John Battelle's Searchblog

Way back in the day, my old company had a lot of beer blasts on Fridays, up on the roof of our building in the city. Lots of folks came, and it got to be expensive, so we brought in sponsors. Then they got really big - and very good for my company's business. Lots of ad deals were closed, lots of new folks were hired in a very competitive market, and our conference business, which ran the parties, made lots of dough. Of course that's not how history remembers them - the parties became symbolic of the excess of the dot com era.

Well, that's OK. You live with history, and learn from it. Today my current company, FM, is having a party on a roof, and I couldn't be more happy about it. It's our fourth annual Author Salon, and we're doing it atop the Hotel Vitale in the city. I'm posting this from the party, and I'm proud to say that as with the last go round, this party is sponsored - by Searchblog. I've not taken money for the ads that run on the site for over a year, and the balance has really piled up. So I decided to use a portion of it to thank our staff, our authors, and our pals and partners by supporting an afternoon celebrating our second anniversary. In a very real way, all of you as readers have made this company and this celebration possible. Thanks! If you're in the neighborhood, come on by!

The Journal covers the inevitable "the grass is greener" story of Google employees leaving to join new startups...(public link).

Wow, the benediction of Walt Mossberg:

Google and Ask each have rolled out new ways of presenting search results. Google's approach, which it calls "universal search," is a modest thing, a first step in what it says will be a long effort to break down barriers between different types of information a user may be seeking, such as Web links, images and news.

But Ask's new system, called "Ask3D," is a much bolder and better advance in unifying different kinds of results and presenting them in a more effective manner. It shows, once again, that Ask places a higher priority than its competitors do on making search results easy to navigate and use.

Domains. Content. AdSense/Affiliate models. There's tons of gold in them thar hills. Marchex is panning....or rather, working some hydraulic strip mines...

SEATTLE, WA - June 27, 2007 - In the largest-scale Web site launch of its kind, Marchex, Inc. (NASDAQ: MCHX, MCHXP) today announced that it has launched more than 100,000 of its local and vertical Web sites, publishing more than one billion Web pages of content, features and functionality for consumers looking for local services and information online, along with highly targeted local advertising inventory.

The newly launched sites now feature more than 15 million business listings across all major yellow pages categories, a deep refinement system, user-generated reviews and ratings, and third-party expert reviews aggregated by Marchex's Open List local content publishing engine.

Watch Demand Media in this space as well. And Name Media...here's a NYT blog on it...

From a release emailed to me:

News Corporation and NBC Universal have appointed Jason Kilar, a key executive at Amazon.com for nearly a decade, to Chief Executive Officer of the online video joint venture the companies formed in March, 2007, it was announced today by Peter Chernin, President and Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation and Jeff Zucker, President and Chief Executive Officer of NBC Universal. Mr. Kilar will join the new company on July 9 and will report to its Board of Directors, which include Mr. Chernin and Mr. Zucker.

The company's video-rich site will debut later this year with thousands of hours of full-length programming, movies and clips from myriad networks and two major film studios and with an unparalleled reach. With distribution partners AOL, CNET, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo!, the new venture will have access to 98 percent of the monthly U.S. unique users on the Internet.
......
Mr. Kilar, 36, spent nearly a decade (1997 – 2006) at Amazon.com, where he quickly rose to help expand the company's core business beyond bookselling. Mr. Kilar originally wrote the business plan for Amazon's entry into the video and DVD businesses and ultimately led that unit as General Manager and Vice President. The video and DVD business grew to several hundred million in revenue under Mr. Kilar's leadership. Mr. Kilar went on to become Vice President and General Manager of Amazon's North American media businesses, which included the company's books, music, video, and DVD categories.

He later served as Senior Vice President, Worldwide Application Software, where his responsibilities included Amazon's Marketplace business and ownership of a significant number of the applications which can be found throughout Amazon's global websites. He reported directly to CEO Jeff Bezos and his organization included hundreds of world-class technologists that innovated the customer experience within the areas of community, media storage and serving, item metadata, automated merchandising and more.

More here and here and here (Paid Content)

Never hurts to put cash in the system, eh?

From an email from Google PR:

Today, Google announced a new pilot initiative called Google Gadget Ventures aimed at bootstrapping an economic ecosystem around gadgets. Since the launch of Google Gadgets more than a year ago, we've seen an increasing opportunity for individuals and companies to build successful businesses around this technology and are piloting this program to help support additional growth.

Google Gadget Ventures will offer third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses two types of funding:

Grants of $5,000 to developers who've built gadgets in our directory that already receive at least 250,000 weekly page views. To apply, qualified Gadget developers will be asked to submit a one-page proposal.
Seed investments of $100,000 to previous Google Gadget Ventures grant recipients who'd like to build a business around the Google Gadgets platform. Qualified developers will be asked to submit a business plan.
The developer community is an extremely important part of our development ecosystem. Our hope for Google Gadget Ventures is to enable developers to grow and diversify the universe of gadgets in a profitable and sustainable way. Ultimately this will result in a wider variety of engaging and useful online content, which is a win for our users.

The release says more info can be found at http://www.google.com/gadgetventures/ but that URL is not resolving....

That's the quote from an advertising study released yesterday.

U.S. advertising spending is predicted to grow a mere 3.1% to $290.3 billion this year, Robert J. Coen, senior VP-director of forecasting at Universal McCann, said in a media briefing Tuesday.

“The outlook for advertising this year is not very good,” Coen said in presenting Universal McCann’s Advertising and Media Outlook Mid-Year Update.

But wait....

Online advertising and search marketing have “violently” impacted established media as the appeal for marketing tactics closely tied to transactions grows.

In terms of national advertising by medium, Internet and direct mail were the biggest gainers in the first quarter, growing 16.7% and 4.5%, respectively, over the same period last year. Spending on TV, spot TV, syndicated TV, spot radio and newspapers decreased in the first quarter.

Ahhh, I see. The outlook is not good *for packaged goods approaches to advertising.* Important distinction...

I'm traveling for the next three days. Posting will be sporadic...

Thomas has the news.

If you'd like to got Searchnomics, have I got a deal for you. OK, Webguild, the organizer, does.

Head here and use the code "fmpub".

You'll get hundreds off! The cost to you is just $100. Wow, thanks Webguild.

Larry Page made a splash at Foo this past weekend by arriving in his personal helicopter. The folks at Make, via Laughing Squid, show the landing and then have some fun with it.

I was in a session at Foo inside the O'Reilly building when Larry landed not 100 yards away. The amazing thing was none of us heard anything. The copter must be super quiet. And fast, I bet.

Interesting:

Local.com Corporation (NASDAQ: LOCM), a leading local search engine, today announced that the company has been awarded patent number 7,231,405 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the process of indexing and retrieving web-related information by geographical location.
The patent covers local search technology related to identifying location information from web documents, indexing that information and making it searchable geographically. In Local.com’s commercial implementation of the technology, the search results are ranked by search term, LocalRank score, location prominence, among other factors. The system then extracts, matches and indexes web pages from the Internet and generates web references where applicable on more than 16 million local businesses listed nationwide on Local.com.

Patents are a real hot button issue in our industry. What do you all make of this? I've sent emails for response from the majors...

Udpate: Donna has a conversation with craigslist CEO here...

For competitive or perhaps even lizard-brain-driven reasons, I think traditional publishers continue to look for viable alternatives to giving their business to Google. Latest example is this deal between Time Inc. and Quigo. The angle here is this, from the Quigo blog:

Unlike the blind ad networks used previously on many of these sites, Time Inc will be able to sell directly to its advertisers text-based, pay-for-performance ads on an individual property, or across a collection of sites. Accordingly, marketers will finally be able to buy ads with full transparency and control on Time Inc properties. As a marketer, this gives you full confidence that you're reaching the high-quality, highly-targeted audience of specific Time Inc properties, and are not wasting ad dollars on questionable sites that are a big part of a blind ad network

Well....AdSense is no longer a blind network, it has site specific ads, and advertisers can check the performance of their ads on a per site basis and optimize. I'm pretty sure Time Inc. could have cut a pretty sweet deal with Google had it wanted to. I sense more is going on here.

It took a long time, but the NYT has one heckuva editorial on the Bush Administration today. Very strongly worded, it's clear to me that the papers are no longer concerned about playing nice with the White House.

President Bush has turned the executive branch into a two-way mirror. They get to see everything Americans do: our telephone calls, e-mail, and all manner of personal information. And we get to see nothing about what they do.

Everyone knows this administration has disdained openness and accountability since its first days. That is about the only thing it does not hide. But recent weeks have produced disturbing disclosures about just how far Mr. Bush’s team is willing to go to keep lawmakers and the public in the dark.

Mike has the scoop...

Wenda Harris Millard, former head of sales, is leaving for Martha Stewart, and Yahoo is unifying search and CPM sales under David Karnstedt. More from PC.

At Foo this weekend and with folks I've been talking to over the past few weeks, FaceBook is often topic #1. The speed with which FaceBook became the presumptive Next Big Thing is awesome. Now, the questions begin. This piece, from Mark Evans, outlines Five Things That Could Kill Facebook.

Matt posts on the role of humans in Google search, prodded by a NYT story on the topic:

If you ask an average techie about Google, you’ll hear that we use lots of computers and algorithms. Indeed, the title of the New York Times article is “The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip.” But (in my opinion), it would be a mistake to think “Google is nothing but cold algorithms and computers; there’s no room for humans at all.” I’ll give you a few examples of the role of people over the years at Google:

- PageRank is fundamentally about the hyperlinks that people on the web create. All those people creating links help Google formulate an opinion of how important a page is.
- Google News looks at a wide variety of news sources; the decisions of human editors at thousands of news sites help Google estimate whether a particular story is significant.
- Google introduced voting buttons on the toolbar back in 2001. They look like happy/frowny faces and they let regular people send thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes to Google.
- Google has allowed users to remove results that they don’t like from Google.
- For more than five years, we’ve allowed users to report spam to Google. We’ve said for years that we reserve the right to take manual action on spam (e.g. if someone types in their name and gets off-topic porn as a result).

And of course, it’s not as if Google’s search engineers drive into the Googleplex in the morning and then spend the whole day sitting around doing nothing while the computers do all the work. :) Instead, Google researchers and engineers spend our days looking for deeper insights that will let us create the next generation of search. I believe Google’s approach to search has always been pragmatic: if an approach will improve the quality of our search, we’re open to it.

He also refers to the interview we did together last year.

At FM we've stepped into a blogstorm, and I'm very sorry for those we've upset.

I've posted a lengthy thinking out loud piece over here on the FM blog....

Just got this email from eBay communications, announcing that eBay is using AdWords again, but read on:

The test we began last week was successful. We found that we were not as dependent on Google AdWords as some may have thought. By re-allocating our marketing dollars to our other partners, such as Yahoo!, AOL and MSN, we were able to increase traffic and find efficiencies that will enable us to drive more value to our sellers and partners going forward. We are now slowly turning AdWords back on, in a much more limited way than before. We will continue to work with Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN and other partners to reach more potential buyers and accelerate business for our community of sellers.

Wow, that's not exactly makeup sex, is it?!

The rumors are heating up. I've had them in my email inbox, and they're on the threads. Hmmmm.

Microsoft alters its approach to desktop search in Vista, but Google says it's not enough. (WaPo, Ars)

Blinkx tries a video Adsense. (b2)

More steps in the development of a cultural grammar for video. (ars)

Business.com in play? My sources say it's just rumors, but those tend to push into reality.

(previously)

I'll admit that my first measure of the place was unfavorable. Coming from a land where building costs can top $1000 a square foot, the Zebra Ranch seemed to my eyes a mistake of sorts - a tar-paper and tin-roof sugar shack wrapped in chain link and topped by razor wire - not promising as a refuge for creativity, to say the least. The second story was set up on mortar blocks, and it was .... shit, was it really a single wide? Yes, I do believe it was.

But that isn't accounting for the setting. As I described in my last Memphis post, just about everything resting on that North Mississippi farmland felt as it belonged there - somehow it made sense that this building - as improbable as it looked - would be there as well. Kudzu, wasps, and grasshoppers multiplied in the glory of a rusting sun. Why not this impossible building?

The chain link gate was open and presented Dallas and I with a choice - to the left of the studio, the path was clear but uncertain, one couldn't see around the corner. To the right a boardwalk of sorts promised continuance, but the headway was clogged with wisteria vines. I chose left, and I chose wrong - a dead end. But as we came closer to the building we could hear music; honest, familiar, unpretentious music, and we knew at least we were in the right place.

Doubling back to the wisteria-laden boardwalk we came to a door, then a brief hallway heavy with Southern humidity and a stronger pulse from the music inside. Now a second door. Through that door we found friends ....

The music dominated the space, so much so that words were unnecessary. Martin leapt up and grinned his salutations, we were in a common room, dominated by a soundboard to the right, a central living room of sorts in the middle, a steep set of stairs leading up to an unknown loft above. Past Martin to the left, the pounding of drums - where Cody was playing; this was no typical studio - Cody had a drum room!

Leading off the back of the commons was a hallway, and to the right of it lay darkness (I later learned that led to Jim's keyboard room), and to the left was Luther's guitar room, but as the music gathered, both doors were closed and the family focused on the jam.

In the center of the commons, to the right, the sound board man nodded in time. On a couch to my left, Allenby, the band manager, focused on the progression, but he looked up to smile and hail me. The music was working toward something, the product of a conversation Dallas and I had just missed, but we were learning as we listened. And everyone, including the musicians, was anticipating its arrival.

This was not the time to raise one's voice. It was time to drop in, to listen, to join. And as Martin passed me a social, I realized that beyond the time I spent with my children, or the moments I steal with my wife, I had found a place where the incessant question we all seem driven by was answered. What else might I be doing? Nothing else but this, my friend, nothing else at all.

For the next 72 hours, I was - happily - on Bonnaroo time.

Notice how and where (bolded):

Starting today, advertisers in the beta will see an alert in their AdWords account informing them that they can now create pay-per-action campaigns. Going forward, advertisers who have enabled AdWords conversion tracking and received more than 500 conversions from their CPC and CPM-based campaigns in the past 30 days will be automatically added to the beta on a rolling basis.

Pay-per-action ads are only shown on publisher sites in the Google content network, also known as Google AdSense™ for content sites.

....here is the release.

Earlier this month we quietly added the first slate of speakers to the Web 2 Summit website.

Our theme this year is "Discovering the Web's Edge." This doesn't mean we're avoiding "mainstream" web companies - far from it, but rather we will be asking the CEOs of those companies where their edge is, and where they might see new, unexplored continents looming.

Along those lines, coming for the first time (we'll have folks from Google and Yahoo as well) are:

Meg Whitman, CEO, eBay
Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft
Philippe Dauman, CEO, Viacom
Eric Nicoli, CEO EMI

Vyomesh Joshi, EVP, HP (runs their Imaging business)

Robert Kotick, CEO, Activision
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook

The full list includes some curveballs too, like Adam Bosworth of Google, talking about health, Evan Williams on Twitter, Reed Hundt of Frontline, Danny Hillis of MetaWeb, Martin Varsavsky of Fon, and many more.

I'm nowhere finished lining up speakers, expect a lot more soon. Meanwhile, if you were planning on coming, you might want to register asap. We're already closing in on our fourth sellout. If you'd like to come and did not get an invitation, please request one here. In the form, you might mention Searchblog, as I'm the fellow who reviews all the requests and decides who comes. I can't promise anything - we have already had 4000 requests and can only take 1000 or so. But I'll do my best.

Hakia, a sponsor of this site, is asking that question on its landing page. I thought the results so far are interesting, given the ongoing conversation around the Web about privacy.

The question:

Do you trust your search engine with your information?

The results:

PS, if you really don't trust the engine, SEL covers a plugin you can use to insure your info is not stored...I tend to not believe these kinds of approaches will work.

From the Compete blog:

There is certainly something magical about reaching 20 million. Web 2.0 darlings, also prime acquisition targets – Digg and Facebook both crossed this milestone last month.

* Digg edged out Facebook, with 2.3 million additional unique visitors
* Facebook is growing 3x faster than MySpace (on a percentage basis)

For what it's worth, Quantcast says Digg has 6.9mm in the US...

Is Yahoo for sale? GigaOm wonders who might buy it, from AT&T to NewsCorp. My money's on private equity.

My my. This from VentureBeat is interesting.

Two more high-level Google engineers have left the Googleplex — this time to join well-known venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.

Bret Taylor (left) and Jim Norris (right), two of the masterminds behind Google Maps and several other Google products, have joined the firm as “Entrepreneurs in Residence.” This gives them paid positions to hang out at Benchmark’s offices on Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road and think through starting a business. They have a specific idea in mind, but are secretive about it, telling VentureBeat only that it’s a “consumer Internet” company.

Reprise is a leading SEO/SEM firm, and it was recently purchased by InterPublic Group, a large advertising agency. (My company FM is working with Reprise). One of its founders, Peter Hershberg, recently sent me a report on its early interactions with Panama, and I thought I'd post some of the company's findings. If you want the full report, I will have uploaded it soon (here is the link to the PDF).

Here's the nut of the Executive Summary:

In short, while it was found to be a significant upgrade over the previous Yahoo DTC (Direct Traffic Center) system (especially for enterprise-grade clients), there are several challenging aspects of the Panama upgrade that may impede Yahoo’s ability to access the long tail of the market.

Reprise evaluates Panama along many lines of inquiry: Campaign Management (including Perfomance), User Interface, and Technology.

Reprise Media undertook an internal cross-functional study of Yahoo's new paid system from a search marketer's perspective, the findings of which are detailed here. This study examines the change that Panama brought about in day-to-day campaign production, optimization and reporting, from both front-end and back-end process perspectives. While we will mention similarities to MSN’s adCenter program, most comparisons in this report center around Google AdWords, given its position as the dominant player in the market and de facto industry standard.

On performance, Yahoo's CPCs went down, and click through rates went up. The explanations:

Yahoo was the only engine whose CPCs decreased over the time surrounding the launch of Panama. These results confirm the conclusion that quality based bidding along with more sophisticated and granular campaign structure is allowing us to improve the Yahoo account performance which ultimately results in lower CPCs.

Yahoo Search Marketing enjoyed a much higher increase in clickthrough rate, bringing it in line with our average Google CTRs. These results demonstrate that the ability to better target our audience through more direct creative, geo-targeting and a separation of search and contextual campaigns are providing us with more qualified ads which are driving the higher click through rates.

Also, conversions were down. The explanation:

While campaign conversion rates were improved on both Google and MSN, Yahoo's conversion dropped off 5%. In other words, while perceived ad relevance may have improved, the truly important metric in the campaign suffered somewhat. This may be due, in part, to the fact that with improved targeting and ad matching/ranking the distribution profiles of these sites has changed somewhat. In this situation, sites that had been converting at a high level no longer make the relevance cut off as defined by the engines. However, at a 5% variance, there is the possibility that this data is just noise - the normal variance that occurs based on a host of other external factors.

On other campaign management, Reprise does not mince words:

By imitating Google’s organization of data, Panama helps establish industry-wide campaign management standards that will benefit agencies and enterprise-level search marketers. Many of Panama’s most useful new features, such as bulk uploading, dynamic keyword insertion, flexible editorial guidelines, geo-targeting, contextual tracking and remote campaign management, are intended to alleviate scalability issues that arise with large-scale campaigns. These efficiencies, however, make Panama complex, and consequently time consuming. In many ways Panama falls short of Google in terms of ease of use, degree of flexibility and reporting options. In general, we find Panama’s handling of data vastly better than Yahoo’s previous Direct Traffic Center (DTC) platform, but still inferior to Google AdWords.

And on UI:

In order to create a platform that would scale with Panama's back-end updates, Yahoo overhauled their user interface. By implementing new organizational systems, new terminology, and new production sheets, Panama created a platform better suited to enterprise-level campaigns. Though the new UI doesn't fully streamline campaign management, it does a good job of establishing more intuitive processes. Furthermore, because Panama's UI structure mimics Google in many ways, it creates operational standards for the search marketing industry.

On Technology:

Panama's technology gives large-scale marketers the ability to more easily request and move around massive amounts of data. For that reason, Yahoo’s new API protocols may have the most significant impact of any changes made....Panama brings Yahoo in line with Google’s standardizing tools, system, structure and meta data, to create an industry standard where it was previously lacking.

Overall:

While the launch of Project Panama represents a significant step forward for the Yahoo Search Marketing platform, it does not yet address all of the
requirements of the market. Though the system makes strides towards establishing industry standard campaign structure, terminology and API
access, it often finds itself under-delivering on the actual execution of these new features.

That said, Panama is brand new. Like any enterprise-level software product, it needs time to find its footing and refine its offering. We are confident
that, with time, Yahoo’s new system will represent a very positive change for paid search advertisers.

There is a lot more in the report. If you're interested, let me know, and I'll do my best to get permission to upload it here.

Ed Felten reports on a case decided by Federal Courts today:

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday, in Warshak v. U.S., that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their email, so that the government needs a search warrant or similar process to access it. The Court’s decision was swayed by amicus briefs submitted by EFF and a group of law professors.

However:

This is not a general ruling that warrants are required to access electronic records held by third parties. The Court’s reasoning depended on the particular attributes of email, and even on the way these particular ISPs handled email. If the ISP’s employees regularly looked at customer email in the ordinary course of business, or if there was a written agreement giving the ISP broad latitude to look at email, the Court might have found differently. Warshak had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his email, but you might not.

Google has a new policy blog (check out last weekend's NN post), and I love the opening line of this post:

This year we've invited all the presidential candidates to come visit Google...

I know they stole that plan from FM, of course. We've invited them all to come to Sausalito for sushi and a drink at the local dive. I wonder which invite they'll accept...

I dunno. At first blush, it makes no sense to me (TC). If it happens, I hope they put someone in who can really lead....

Why give away 25% of your company to get something when you have a new CEO, an embattled image, and freaked out senior staff? It would smack of desperation, would it not? And I thought Murdoch viewed MySpace as critical to Newscorp's future?

I'm headed to Washington for a day to join the IAB, I am on the board there now. Let me know if you all have any issues the IAB might address....

Wow. Two years. And hey, it did start in a garage....

From the Google blog:

We're pleased to announce that we've acquired the assets of Zenter, a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations.

You've heard us talk a lot about using the web to improve group collaboration and information sharing. These days, when you create a document -- whether it's a text document, a spreadsheet, or a presentation -- you usually want to share it, collect feedback, or communicate about it in some way. We on the Google Docs & Spreadsheets team focus on making this experience easier and more powerful for you. In particular, we're working to add presentation-sharing capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and we're excited about the addition of Zenter's technology and team to that effort.

Now really, Wired. I'm so proud of being part of the founding of this great brand, but honestly, guys, I'm not "fighting the power." I'm asking a question.

Marc is writing up a storm on startups. This post really resonated (why not to do a startup) and in particular, this passage:

You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.

Over and over and over.

Oh man, yes.

I've found myself more and more wary of doing things that I'd like to do with Google applications simply out of some primal, lizard brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source. It's not that I don't trust Google, it's not that I don't like the applications, it's that I'm worried they might fall to some ill use, out of the control of the current brand as I've come to understand it today. Or perhaps it's deeper than that - I simply can't let too much of my online life run through any one control point, regardless of who it is.

Already, Google has my feed (through Feedburner), a portion of my business( through Doubleclick, which serves some of our ads at FM), most of my search history (I use Google more than any other engine), and another portion of my business (we use Google for backfill ads at FM). But yesterday I decided not to run Google Calendar for something business related, even though it would have been perfect for us, and earlier we decided to not run Google spreadsheets, because we didn't want "Google" to have access to sensitive competitive information. I still use some Google services for other portions of the work I do - like planning conferences, for example.

But I have noticed that I've hit, perhaps, my "Google saturation point."

How about all of you? Has this issue crossed your mind?

Update: Matt writes: given Google's strict privacy policies, I wouldn't worry about something like using Google Calendar or Gmail. I'll check if someone at Google can talk a bit somewhere about the protections we have in place for data like that.

I would love to see the text applying directly to that, Matt. I recall the overall TOS for an account, but they include text like this:

11.1....By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

11.2 You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

And I recall Google's privacy policy, which includes this:

# We may use personal information to provide the services you've requested, including services that display customized content and advertising.
# We may also use personal information for auditing, research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services.

Well, that's pretty broad, Matt. What if you use the data an entrepreneur gives you about his new startup, say through Analytics or Calendar, to make your competing service better?

Well, perhaps really, the new (anti) portal. Paul posts a portion of an email from an ex-Googler who left for Facebook.

A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I am writing this note to spread Good News to all the friends I haven't already overwhelmed with my enthusiasm: Facebook really is That company.

Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while -- the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other's genius. That company that's doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can't pull off. That company that's on the cusp of Changing The World, that's still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you'll kick yourself in three years if you don't jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life.

I'm serious. I have drunk from the kool-aid, and it is delicious.

The fellow goes on to ask folks to join him at Facebook.

We've all been thinking about Facebook a lot lately, and many of us have been using it, as it's impossible not to thanks to the onslaught of industry folk who are giving it a whirl and inviting you in. It's a slick application and the open approach to plugins is brilliant in its simplicity. But the real question, if the future of the site is as a next generation "anti-portal" is to address the question of how to appropriately integrate the conversation of marketing into the site.

That's a question I've thought about a lot, as those of you with patience for my ramblings know. I'm looking forward to using Facebook more, as I figure the more I use it, the more ideas I might have to share here.

PaidContent covers a call with Yang and Decker and the official release. In short, the big reorg is being undone, Decker is the President, there will be no new audience head, and more...

Journal: Google isn't the only one facing anti trust scrutiny. (via SEL)

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating two more mergers in the fast-growing online-advertising industry.

The FTC is conducting antitrust reviews of Microsoft Corp.'s $6 billion bid for aQuantive Inc. and Yahoo Inc.'s $680 million deal for the 80% of closely held ad-exchange operator Right Media Inc. it didn't already own, lawyers close to these deals said. The FTC already is investigating Google Inc.'s $3.1 billion bid for DoubleClick Inc.

Ars points out where Google Video, eclipsed in our consciousness by YouTube, is heading.

Following Google's acquisition of YouTube in 2006, many questions emerged about the future of Google's own video service. These questions were largely answered early this year, when Google expanded its video service to include YouTube search support and revealed plans to expand video search functionality to support a broad assortment of other sites as well. These plans are now coming to fruition as the scope of the Google Video search index broadens to cover content hosted outside of the company's web empire.

Has Steve peaked? My pal Heilemann asks in this week's NY Magazine.

Meredith, a publisher, buys Healia, a health search engine.

Quintura, visual search engine, gets funded (VentureBeat).

Reuters UK does a major piece on Google and privacy.

Clusty goes mobile.

Journal:

Yahoo Inc. said Terry Semel will step aside as its chief executive and be replaced by co-founder Jerry Yang, as the Internet icon attempts to regain investor confidence.
[Terry Semel]

Mr. Semel, a former Hollywood executive who joined Yahoo in 2001, will remain chairman in a non-executive role. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company also expanded the duties of Susan Decker, who was recently named the head of the company's advertising business, and named her its new president.

Chronicle (AP):

Yahoo Inc. Chairman Terry Semel ended his six-year stint as chief executive officer Monday and will hand over the reins to co-founder Jerry Yang in the Internet icon's latest attempt to regain investor confidence.

Semel, 64, will remain chairmain in a non-executive role.

Besides naming Yang as its new CEO, Yahoo appointed Susan Decker as its president. Decker, who had been recently promoted to oversee Yahoo's advertising operations, had widely been seen as Semel's heir apparent.

PaidContent

Yahoo blog: Yang:

What is that vision? A Yahoo! that executes with speed, clarity and discipline. A Yahoo! that increases its focus on differentiating its products and investing in creativity and innovation. A Yahoo! that better monetizes its audience. A Yahoo! whose great talent is galvanized to address its challenges. And a Yahoo! that is better focused on what’s important to its users, customers, and employees.

The past year has obviously not been an easy one for us. But we’ve taken important steps to address the challenges we face, and we’re starting to realize some of the benefits – especially with the successful launch of Panama, which continues to receive positive feedback from advertisers and is exceeding our expectations. By the way, that’s directly attributable to the operational excellent mentality Terry has instilled and is a clear sign one of his most critical initiatives is succeeding.

As I said earlier, Tennessee got me thinking a lot last week, in particular about music as the canary in the coal mine of the entire Internet economy. I started imagining a major event in the business, and I wrote the below (entirely fiction) just to see how it felt. In fact, I wrote 2600 words of fiction last week. I'm finding it a really interesting way to work out some of the knottier issues in this industry. I might start doing more of it.

Here's a piece of it:

October 17, 2007 (San Francisco/Dow Jones) In a surprise move today that has the entertainment industry buzzing, Sony Chairman Howard Stringer announced that his company was encouraging its entire stable of musical acts to release their music freely on the Internet, effectively immediately. The company said it would release the masters, or original recordings of the artists' work, back to the creator, and ask only that the artists work in good faith to find the best method for freely sharing the newly unencumbered work.

Once a crown jewel in a company now struggling to find its footing in a new economic regime, Sony's music business has languished recently, and executives increasingly have blamed the Internet for the decline. Stringer's announcement marks an about face for the media giant, and potentially a harbinger of things to come in the film, publishing, and other intellectual property-driven media businesses.

Stringer's announcement follows that of EMI Chairman Eric Nicoli, who in the Spring announced all EMI music would be sold without DRM, or digital rights management software, which effectively controlled distribution of music in the new medium and slowed the natural discovery of music by potential fans.

"We have to find new models, it's clear the old ones are not working," Stringer announced. "And the only way we'll find them is to let the music find them for us."

Asked by reporters what models Stringer thought might develop, he pointed to marketing partnerships, advertising, touring, and merchandise. "We didn't do this without studying the landscape," he said. "We noticed the bands that shared their music had much higher alternative revenues. In fact, we realized many of them didn't need a record label at all. The question becomes, then, what do they need, and how can we be of service to them?"

"Sony is now artist-driven," he declared.

Sony's stock dropped sharply on the announcement, but then picked up and closed even for the day. Analysts were uncertain about the impact of Stringer's move, as the recording division had not been a significant addition to margin for several years. In fact, unders Stringer the division became "sort of like a bag of rocks bumping against the company's flanks," said Josh Keegan, an analyst for JP Morgan Securities. "Everyone was noticing it."

Bonnaroo and Memphis have my head spinning, stories bumping around asking to be let out. But for now, back to search. First up: the WebGuild is offering $200 off their conference later this month, which I cannot attend but sounds great. More info here...

I got a chance to spend 24 or so hours in Memphis before Bonnaroo. I'd never been. But I was lucky enough to have guides.

My buddy Martin texts me a number as I'm leaving Orlando, Memphis bound. "Call Dallas" was the word, Dallas being the man who would be at the airport ready to take me to my destination, the vibrantly decomposed studio of Jim Dickinson and his boys Cody and Luther, who form two thirds of the North Mississippi All Stars. They were recording together, on the family farm 35 minutes or so outside Memphis in the North Mississippi woods. Dallas was going to take me there.

I rang Dallas while still on the tarmac. It's been quite some time since I've had walking around time. You know, the kind of time where you land somewhere foreign, you know one guy maybe, or bump into someone, and that person takes you to another world. It'd been years since I'd been to Tennessee. The place lived in my mind as legend, mostly through music. And I'd never been to Memphis.

"Travel. Dallas," he answers.

Dallas, I tell him, John.

"Alright. I'm five minutes from the airport. You on the tarmac?" Gentle, like bourbon on new ice.

Yes, I say.

"I'll be at the top of the escalators as you come out. I'm dressed like a tourist, got a panama hat. And a badge."

I knew I'd like Dallas.

After the obligatories (hotel, beer, ice, food), we drove across the Mississippi and headed south for a while, the highway cutting through woods and rolling farmland. Dallas regaling me with stories of the land as we tooled along in his Chevy wagon - the one with the same engine as the 1994 Corvette - same transmission, too. Thirty minutes and we took a left, we're in low folds of resting grassland, punctuated by high elms - were they elms? - draped in kudzu. Were it not for agriculture, this would be impassable land.

Fourth driveway at the left, Cody had put a red bandana on the mailbox. We hit a dirt road, then we pass one, and another single wide. Someone might live there. Then again, someone might not. But nothing felt out of place.

A quarter mile down a clearing, and a mowed field, crowned by forty-foot kudzu skirted woods. In the field, to the left as we entered, an Airstream, seen better years, but still proud. And past it, as we pan to our right, a Chevy Grand Torino, maybe 1974, rusting but again, nobly. Immediately to its right is a 1990 or so 280Z, sweetly clenched in a decades long conversation with mother nature. We had arrived at a good moment, as Mother Nature had figured out a way to claim the old car, namely by pushing a six-foot-tall blackberry shoot - tall and straight as any tree - impossibly through the hood, and dead center to boot.

Then I saw the studio.

(next)

Reader Jack Lail, who my damn Typekey issues prevented from commenting, sent me this:

My paper, The Knoxville News Sentinel, has a producer blogging and Twittering at Bonnaroo. Check Lauren Spuhler's coverage out.

And check out the

Twitter page

She's got some great stuff up already!

Cool, thanks Jack!

If there's one clear theme to the conversations I've found myself in with folks here, it's the shift in the music business, a very real, ground level shift - toward empowering the artist and the music, away from the control of "the business" as its been constructed over the past few decades. It's palpable, musicians, managers, fans, producers, they are all speaking the same language. Sure, this has been heralded for years, and trumpeted with EMI's DRM about face and Jobs' open letter, but to be here, feeling it in real time, makes it that much more powerful. It feels an awful lot like the web 2 space in 2003. A good vibe, driven by a shared set of values that's not anti-business, but more, well, author-driven, so to speak.

A company to watch in all of this is Red Light Management. I've met some of the folks from this talent management business, and they are working in interesting new ways.

In the past 24 hours I've seen more great music that's new to me than I've found in the past year. (I'll admit, that's not hard, given the rock I've been under). I'll post some of it, Fred Wilson style, later on.

Where am I?

Grokking Bonnaroo.

Jeff Kravitz, a photographer and new blogger, is here shooting (that's his work from earlier this evening). His thought on tonight:
"Thursday night is like Einstein when we was a baby. Friday we split the atom."

It's good to be here. I'll post when Jeff does. The music and the scene is really astounding.

Guess I was wrong. A reader sent me a cancellation notice, Google is now no longer trying to poach the party goers at EBay's fest. I bet some senior folks on both sides must have traded a few curtly worded emails....

Update: Holy sh8t, check this out:

EBay Inc. has pulled all of its advertising from Google Inc.'s U.S. network in what is widely seen as punishment for trying to crash eBay's user conference in Boston this week.

The move exposes the widening rift between eBay and Google, as they increasingly compete on new products, making a public showdown inevitable, according to analysts.

"We've seen that the two companies have been on a collision course for a long time," said Derek Brown, an analyst for Cantor Fitzgerald. "This seems to be the latest and most bizarre twist."

Yes they have been. As a reader of Searchblog, though, you have known that for a very long time.

I'll be running around the country the next four days. Sporadic updates to follow...

From Ars:

One of the few survivors from the dotcom bubble that we know today as "Web 1.0" has now announced that it is moving firmly into the Web 2.0 world. The online auction site eBay announced at the eBay Developer conference in Boston that it has opened up its three core businesses—eBay, PayPal, and Skype—to third-party developers. These new application programming interfaces (APIs) are being released as part of a limited beta program: attendees at the eBay developer conference will get preferred access.

From TechDirt:

A patent holding company named Geomas has the rights to a broad and obvious patent on location-based search that just about every local search or online yellow pages site probably violates. The company has apparently raised $20 million from some of the growing list of investment firms drooling over the innovation-killing patent-hoarding lawsuit rewards and is kicking things off by suing Verizon for daring to put its phone book online in the form of Superpages.com.

Last week saw the launch of Mahalo, the new human powered search index from Jason Calacanis (that's his dog, at left, one of his favorite online images). Jason has a flair for getting attention, and you all gave him some in the comments on my post noting the launch, all right. I emailed Jason for his response and we did the classic Searchblog back and forth. One thing I can say for Jason: He speaks his mind (see his comments on Squidoo, below). The interview:

What do you make of the response so far to Mahalo?

First off, I'm thrilled with the amount of attention and feedback the project has gotten. It's a very contrarian idea, so I think some folks are rightfully exited and/or skeptical. Launching at the D conference certainly contributed to the excitement.

Of course, we've heard and developed a strategy to resolve the issues that people first think of when you say "human search" months ago. As you can imagine, when we spoke to our investors they brought up the same issues: how does it scale, how do you deal with human bias, how do you keep the search results up to date, why would people switch from google, how many search results do you need to reach scale, how is it defensible, etc.

I'm also excited that the SEO community has predicted it will fail because, of course, they have the most to lose when it succeeds! (Jason has been notorious for dinging the SEO community).

Why is this better than, say, ChaCha? And how is it different from the many approaches of the past that have not worked?

For the top 10,000 searchers we will be better than ChaCha because we have full-time, well trained, Guides spending 10 hours building each search result. That's a lot of effort compared to the five or ten minute interaction with a live ChaCha Guide being paid, what, like $6 an hour (or $2 on a net-net basis from what I've been reading--ChaChat guides only get paid during ACTIVE searches from what I can see. So, if they get three five minute interactions per hour they make 1/4 of an hours pay for sitting in front of their computer for an hour--or like $1.50 or $2 I think).

That being said, I'm a fan of ChaCha for long tail searches. I like the concept of real-time searching and I think we're going to add that feature to Mahalo.com at some point later this year. I've read many folks beating up ChaCha, but I think that ChaCha can make live search work in the way that Yahoo made Answers work after Google gave up on Answers.
Also, I think ChaCha would be a nice plugin to Mahalo, so perhaps there is a partnership opportunity for the two companies (although I haven't reached out to them yet).

In terms of past approaches, I think Scott's original vision for About.com/Mining Company *did* work, and the DMOZ absolutely worked--for a time. Both of those projects, however, suffered from neglect and a lack of resources. About.com has really switched from being a "guide to the web" to a destination. If you compare our Poker result with their result you will see they are trying to answer the questions and we're trying to help you find the people who can answer the question. Both are valuable, but my feeling is that the world doesn't need Mahalo to answer questions for them--especially not with the Wikipedia doing such a phenomenal job answering questions. The most we're doing are the "fast facts" in the top right hand page of SeRPs. Those are like the top five facts to quickly confirm we got what you're looking for, and maybe fill in some knowledge gaps users might have--not comprehensive in any way.

What the world needs now curation--not more experts.

Also, the world has changed in a number of ways since we last tried this type of project:

a) Software and bandwidth are essentially free--taking out 50% of the cost of running a web-based business. This trend is call Web 2.0... it's gonna be big I think. ;-)
b) Google Adsense exists as a massive, scalable, and wildly efficient monitization engine. We're not going to sell ads directly... we're gonna leverage the services out there based on which ones perform best on a PER-SERP basis.
c) There are many more users online doing many more searches today
d) There is a lot more noise and "bad actors" polutting the web today (Blackhat SEOs, spammers, affiliate traps, splogs, etc), and as a result folks are frustrated with search.

Speaking of curation, what do you make of Squidoo?

I just did a search for Paris Hotels on Mahalo and Squidoo, the result are obvious: Squidoo is a disaster and Mahalo is helpful. If you give folks the tools to make anything they will, and if you get some page rank the SEOs will come in and destroy your service. That's what's happened to Squidoo in the past year--it's a dark, dirty, SEO back-alley now and I think folks are afraid to just say that. Do ten searches and look at the results--it's garbage. There might be one good lens every once and while, but as a service it's just horrible.

Seth had a good idea with Squidoo I think--empowering people. However, the execution was way too open and you can see what happens when you let anyone do anything without a mandate (think Wikipedia if it WASN'T an encyclopedia project and it didn't have an active group of admins).

Squidoo is actually dangerous to use and it fails the number one test of Internet usability and trust: would you send your mother there.

That being said it has to be making a fortune for Squidoo and their 'lens masters" because you can't tells what's an advertisement and what's not. With Google's new "let us know about deceptive advertising" program it's only a matter of time before Squidoo winds up in the penalty box in my mind.

Seth should pull the plug on it.

... other than that I have not thoughts on Squidoo. :-)

You've said you can go four years without revenue. But your last business made a pretty good living on AdSense. Do you plan to do that again? Also, what about lead gen or similar deals? How do you plan to make money?

We are testing adsense already (see corvette page). My position, and the investors/board position, is that we should spend year one figuring out how to make *perfect* search results (a lofty goal), while figuring out how to scale our process.
As we all know search advertising is the most desired advertising on the planet because users are saying what they are interested in *right now*. It is the most effective advertising on the planet for this reason. If we build a great product it will scale, and if you have scale--as I learned at AOL--you can't help but make money. Advertisers love scale--thats what federated media is hitting the ball out of the park--ya got scale you win!

Thanks, Jason!

Update: Jason just launched his Greenhouse effort to get the public involved in helping create search results...

PodZinger, which I've covered here, has rebranded as EveryZing and rolled out new services.

EveryZing is a media merchandising platform that helps content producers and web publishers dynamically increase the volume of consumable online multimedia content while simultaneously enhancing its monetary value.

Unlike other general web search and aggregation services that work only on meta data and tags, EveryZing leverages its unique speech to text, search, and optimization technologies to unlock the content within multimedia and automatically process and organize it to power a compelling ecosystem which easily connects media companies with publishers, consumers, and advertisers.

Reuters:

Top online video service YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world's largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co..

The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google Inc., will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner's permission, legal, marketing and strategy executives at YouTube told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

The so-called video fingerprinting tools, which identify unique attributes in the video clips, will be available for testing in about a month, a YouTube executive said.

Here it is. Austin, cool town, I can vouch for that!

It's a co branded engine for PayPal commerce sites ... check it out. From the release:

TheFind, Inc. (www.thefind.com) today announced the launch of paypal.thefind.com, a new shopping search engine built specifically to enable consumers to browse products exclusively from merchants who accept PayPal payments.

Just like results on TheFind.com, products will be shown to PayPal customers as visually compelling catalog-like images, not simply text links or thumbnail images. Unlike traditional comparison shopping sites, merchants will not have to pay for their products to appear in search results on paypal.thefind.com; instead, products from PayPal merchants will be indexed and become part of the natural search results.

Remember when I wrote this? In it I suggested:

Is it too much to ask, I keep asking, to ask our online services to provide us:

- Access to a record of all the information they keep on us and how they use it
- The ability to challenge that data's accuracy, and edit it for accuracy
- The ability to opt out (with a clear understanding of the resulting loss of services and opportunities that might result)
- The ability to set permissions as to who else might see the data
- The right to maintain a user copy of that data for archival purposes
- The right to share in the value of that data on negotiated terms

Is that so freaking hard to do? I sense that, increasingly, there is a market opportunity in doing this. I bet 95% of the public will never edit, or even view the data more than once. But the sense that the control panel is there, just in case, will be invaluable to establishing trust.

I later called this a Data Bill of Rights.

Danny just asked Google about this idea in light of the Privacy Intl kerfluffle (his post is long and very good) and Google's recent post on "How Long Should Google Remember Searches?", and he found out Google is seriously considering that approach. From Danny's post:

I asked Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer about this yesterday, when talking to him about the Privacy International survey.

"We're thinking hard internally along the digital dashboard-type of approach. Is there a way to give users a dashboard and visibility to all these elements and give them control," he said. "It would be hugely complicated to build, but in terms of that vision, I completely share it, and we're having deep discussions about it."

Way cool.

This may not strike the world as big news, but in the ad world, it's important: Google today announced "Content Placement Reports". Sounds boring, but stay with me here. (No links available for this yet, will update...)

What is it? From the announcement: In an ongoing effort to provide more transparency to advertisers, Google announced today the availability of a new AdWords report, called a Placement Performance report, which enables advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. Placement Performance reports also provide site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites. With these reports, advertisers have much more visibility into their contextually targeted advertising spend and are able to leverage the information to more effectively optimize their campaigns and meet their objectives. Designed in response to advertisers' requests, Placement Performance reports offer advertisers both increased transparency and greater control over their contextual advertising, which ultimately leads to more relevant ads for users.

In short, Google is dealing with what is known as the "blind network problem" - advertisers pour money into AdSense, and they get a sense of how the campaign performed in aggregate, but they have no idea which sites did great, and which sites did poorly, or often, even which sites they ended up on (unless they specified via the relatively new site specific buys on AdSense.)

This new set of reporting addresses this issue, allowing advertisers to determine where their campaigns are doing best, and then they can optimize accordingly. It's a major step for Google, and it solidifies the company as the player to beat in third party ad networks. Does this have anything to do with the Doubleclick acquisition? Come on, is the Pope Catholic?

When AdSense launched, it was as a blind network that occupied the bottom of the value pyramid - it didn't care where ads were placed, as it was driven purely by direct response (ie, did someone click on the ad or not?). An entire industry was born of this idea: Pour money in, get money back. Who cares where the ads show up, as long as they payoff?

Now Google will become far more driven by specific publishing sites - "we'll help you find the sites where your ads do best, and help you target those sites specifically." This in turn will help advertisers find the sites where response is greatest. However, direct response is not always the best measure of effectiveness. It works great for demand satisfaction, but it has nothing to do with awareness or demand creation. Those two key pieces of the marketing puzzle still require things that cannot be driven by algorithms - at least for now. Will Google get into the business of helping marketers craft campaigns for particular sites based on understanding the audiences at those sites? Until now, the company was not even close to that business. But with this business, it's getting closer, and closer, to becoming what most of the world calls a content publisher. Interesting.

Update: Some reactions, coverage:

ClickZ
SEW
SEL

Update: Previous, related news from Yahoo.

Google is most definitely a cat, not a dog, when it comes to brands. The image of Google is rather feline - it sits there unruffled, not really *needing you*, but then it jumps in your lap when you least expect it. Google is not a brand that, well, asks for attention.

That's why this news came as something of a surprise to me.

In short, Google is going after eBay's core, and it's doing it by throwing a party. My goodness.

Are you an online seller attending eBay Live! in Boston this week? If so, join us for a celebration of user choice at the Google Checkout Freedom Party on Thursday night (6/14). To get to the party, just hop on the classic Beantown trolley in front of the Boston Convention Center and follow the freedom trail to the Old South Meeting House. We’ll use the same spot where revolutionaries launched the Boston Tea Party to celebrate freedom with free food, free drinks, free live music -- even free massages. Join us and bring a friend. RSVP here.

Thanks Trish.

Gary found a study that shows online shoppers will pay extra to protect their privacy. We value it, no doubt.

The Searchblog job board has gone mostly dormant after an initial flurry of action. Then this one lone job came around. I promised I'd post on the jobs every so often so go check it out, and you can still post a job if you want. Maybe I should add a fourth column and give the stuff way below the fold a better home...

Well, this isn't the finale, but it's something of a curtain raiser. Those of you who've read Searchblog for a while knew this was coming. Google's got a privacy kerfluffle at the moment, and the reactions are interesting.

The original release from Privacy International (yow, that's not good).
The Media Story. (ouch, wow, says Average Joe Newsreader, Google sucks).
Danny (the counterintuitive Google defense).
TechCrunch.
Scoble.

In the end, this is only going to play poorly for Google. Sure, folks like us might read Danny or TC and realize the story has more than one angle. But two or three orders of magnitude more folks will only read the Media Story.

Google, get out in front of this one....

Update: Matt posts this response.Donna posts this response to that response.

Thanks to Ars, I found this from the Times (OK, I have family in this weekend, I'm not reading the Times):

In the most striking recent example of the policy shift, the top antitrust official at the Justice Department last month urged state prosecutors to reject a confidential antitrust complaint filed by Google that is tied to a consent decree that monitors Microsoft’s behavior. Google has accused Microsoft of designing its latest operating system, Vista, to discourage the use of Google’s desktop search program, lawyers involved in the case said.

Read the rest of the story. It only gets better. How I wish I had time to report this...

When news of Google's acquisition of Feedburner broke last week, those of us who have known Dick Costolo for a while were all smiles - Dick is a great guy, and we all love his service, which has a very publisher friendly approach and provides real benefit to us all. I shot a congratulatory email to Dick and asked him a few questions over the course of the week. Here's the exchange:

Why did you sell to Google?

We help publishers manage distributed media by providing a suite of services for analytics, distribution/promotion, and monetization. On the media call yesterday, I said that we thought there was tremendous overlap between our competencies and the depth and breadth of Google's offerings. Susan Wojcicki commented on this point during the call and used the term complementary instead of overlap, and I think that's a much better word choice for a few reasons. We both offer detailed publisher analytics, but Google is extremely strong on site and marketing analytics while we are light on site analytics but very deep on feed and distribution analytics. Further, while our customer base is a critical mass of publishers (over 400k) that grows at an amazing rate, we have select advertiser relationships. It goes without saying that Google's depth and breadth of advertiser relationships well complement the critical mass of publishers we serve. I could go on with a number of other examples like this. So, I like the term complementary as a defining theme for the reasoning behind this relationship.

Why now?

Timing about anything like this is always a hard question to answer, mostly because it's not necessarily up to one party to decide on timing. Both parties have to agree it makes sense. That's obvious I suppose, but it can make a unilateral answer to a timing question sound a bit (or a lot) disingenuous. Acknowledging that, I'd say there are two components to the timing question and both harken back to my answer above. I say 'harken back' as if I wrote the paragraph above in 1972. Anyway, I mentioned speed of innovation. We now have well over 400k publishers leveraging one or more of our services (do you like how I've pointed out that number twice? This is what we call 'on message'). The type and variety of publisher working with FeedBurner has grown in interesting ways in the last couple years, and it has become more and more evident that in order to provide timely services to as many of our publishers as quickly as possible, FeedBurner must scale in multiple directions simultaneously. Google's track record for scaling services and innovating on them quickly for a global customer base adds to the logic behind our decision. To elaborate on one element of this point, I have talked before about our desire to provide publishers with a 360 degree view of audience and reach analytics. This is an immensely difficult challenge - one need only note the continued inability of competent third party organizations to agree on classic page view or visitor metrics for many sites - and it has simply become more obvious to us that this is an important challenge and that fully meeting this challenge requires further innovation in a number of areas. Could it be pursued by a private company continuing to operate independently? Of course, but you always want to focus on making sure your customers are successful and part of that is understanding when there is a shorter path from here to there! The folks that we've talked to at Google and the work that we've all recently seen come out of Google Analytics convincingly point toward a shared vision. Apologies for switching between first person, third person, and second person all in one paragraph; I think that's the grammar police at the door now.

What changes might we expect in the FB service?

Our immediate focus is integration along several service lines. Certainly, the FeedBurner services that people love will be integrated and enhanced with complementary Google services. While there is tremendous excitement about the kinds of next generation feed services we can deliver, we want to make sure we pay initial attention to speedy integration.

What will you do now that you could not do before?

The short answer is "more, faster". We need to innovate along multiple axes simultaneously in order to meet the needs of such a diverse publisher base (analytics, distribution promotion, rich media syndication, etc), so we are now in a position where we can tackle more of these challenges more quickly instead of having to pick a linear innovation path that values some publishers over others. So, I don't think we had anything we couldn't do before, but now we can do more of the things we need to do more quickly.

Is everyone staying in Chicago? Will you join Google's offices there?

Everyone is staying where they are based, yes (we have a few people based outside of Chicago), and we will indeed join Google's offices in Chicago, although it is still unclear whether my request for a luxuriously appointed desk in the Queen Anne style is being taken as seriously as it should be.

What does this mean for Feedburner's ad sales? Will it be taken over by Adsense, or will you continue to sell it independently?

We're definitely looking forward to leveraging Google's existing sales efforts. Selling it independently wouldn't provide the scale we'd like to offer to publishers as quickly as we'd like to provide it.

Everyone wonders, no one asks, so I will: What's it like to know you've made this kind of money?

As you well know, starting a company is hugely stressful, regardless of what you're trying to build, and my cofounders and I have been doing this since 1995 or so. Especially as you get married and have kids, there's just an always-on anxiousness in your mind about financial health, maybe sometimes more at the forefront of your thoughts and other times in the back of your mind, but always there, in much the same way you feel a constant anxiety about coursework when you're in college (at least I felt that way!). So, to continue that analogy, it feels like the sense of relief you have after finishing a final exam; you have this stress that was present on some level for an extended period of time that falls away. That's the best way I can describe it - you can see why I'm not a motivational speaker.

What do you want to be doing in five years?

I'm sure this will reflect poorly on my approach to personal growth, but I've never given thought to what I want to or should be doing a year or two down the road. I don't know why, I've just never approached things that way. I generally think in very immediate terms like "is this fun" or "it's time to stop doing this and try doing that", but i've never thought to myself "by the end of next year, I should be doing X", so I can't for the life of me take an honest crack at what I'd want to be doing in five years. Right now I want to keep doing what I'm doing, but five years from now? It's a mystery.

Thanks Dick, and congrats to you and the whole team!

Via SEW, a search service that gives you tons of options as to where you might search. Cool.

From Thomas Hawk:

Well unfortunately it looks like the Chinese government may be censoring Flickr images in China. There are not a lot of details on this yet, but Flickr Chief Stewart Butterfield has issued two comments on a help forum on the matter:

Update from Flickr staff (10:00 PDT, June 7th) : It seems that access to our image servers is being blocked for users in much of China. Our technical staff has looked into this at depth and determined this is not a technical issue from our end. We will keep an eye on the situation and update if we get any developments.

Update from Flickr staff [2] (01:00 PDT, June 8th) : We are checking periodically to see if the block is still in place, but haven't detected any change. We hope that this is a temporary issue and we currently believe that it will be. In the meantime, we are investigating our alternatives. Thank's for your patience,

If you want to follow this case on an ongoing basis you can follow it in this official help thread over at Flickr here.

Folks:

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Looks that way. Thank the lord the Senate is getting its sense back.

Prior coverage.

Bill Tancer has published this list:

It appears from this early analysis that the big winners for this new format are YouTube and Maps, while Image Search and News (which under the older format were occasionally featured top of page) are on the losing end.

Larry reports from an Engadget story about the silly things scared executives will do:

We can't say that we'd recommend a CEO steal property from Google in order to prove a point, but the head honcho of Macmillan Publishers pushed his superego aside and did just that at a recent BookExpo America in NYC. It's no secret that a number of publishers have been up in arms about Google's approach to digitizing their works, but Richard Charkin went so far as to recruit a colleague and swipe a pair of laptops from a Google Books kiosk at the event. About an hour later, the booth attendants actually noticed the missing goods and presumably began to panic, and the haughty executive then had the nerve to return the machines to their rightful owners whilst dropping the "hope you enjoyed a taste of your own medicine" line.

Google is, that is. As this Bloomberg story reports (thanks, PC):

Google Inc., the Web-search company whose motto is ``Don't be evil,'' now has to confront the realities of Washington to propel its stock further.

The 8-year-old company with a $162 billion market value didn't open a lobbying office in the U.S. capital until 2005. Now, as expansion plans invite government scrutiny, Google is stepping up efforts to master a game political foes such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. have played for decades.

Google wants to change how wireless spectrum is valued. AT&T and Verizon think that's a bad idea. Surprised?

An interesting interview with the founder of Relona, "designed to help Yahoo/Ask/MSN catch-up with Google." It's a pretty audacious claim, but fun to read.

From Erick:

One prediction is that Apple is going to announce a deal to bundle in Google's Webtop products (gmail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets,Google Calendar, etc.) into upcoming Macs. At least that's what Fred Vogelstein thinks, based on recent hints from Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs.

Fred's post, as mashed by T'meme is here.

Let us not forget that Eric is on Steve's board...

MS Live Labs and BBC Partner to Produce Cool Photosynth Demo

Webcast: Distinguished Speaker Series, Jaron Lanier Speaks at Yahoo

Bowker Reports U.S. Book Production Rebounded Slightly in 2006

Video Interview of Tim Berners Lee at MIT

Google WiFi Wars in San Francisco gets Nasty

More rumors. If Yahoo does win Facebook, that'd be quite a coup, even at $2 billion, I'd warrant. But, Google has a way of swooping in at the last minute and winning the deal. If Google bought Facebook, would that be a shark-jumping move? Would that be Google simply owning too much of the current web?

Related: Murdoch in the Journal: "We've got to find new ways and new business models to get revenues. Or else the world is going to be owned by Google."

If you've been reading a while, you've seen my coverage of Udi's career, from A9 to Google (and before, though I did not cover his work at Yahoo or prior to that...).

I pinged him a while back and he got back to me after the universal search announcement had passed (he had a lot to do with it...).

Here's our brief interview:

How did Google make the decision to do universal search? What got you comfortable with the approach? It reminded me of the things we spoke of when you were at A9...

The project started way before I arrived at Google. What you see today is just the beginning, and it's a culmination of many different pieces that came together recently. What got us comfortable are three things: First, the design of the infrastructure is solid. It's scalable, measurable, and efficient. Second, we solved some interesting ranking problems, which allows us to mix results from many sources in the right way. Third, and most important, we put together a wonderful team that got it done. David Bailey and Dan Belov (from Engineering) and Johanna Wright (from Product Management) ( see http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/behind-scenes-with-universal-search.html ) lead the core team, but this was an effort of many teams over a period of time. Again, this is just the first step.

I'm very interested in the next steps. Without telling us too much (if you would like to, why, please do), what are the interesting problems in search right now that you feel well positioned to address?

As search gets better, user expectations rise even higher, and we need to improve at a faster rate. Most of our work still focuses on the fundamentals -- making results more relevant, more comprehensive, for more users, in more languages. Much of this work involves pure algorithms, deep understanding of search and of the web, and just plain hard work. Just the way we like it. It is not sexy to the outside world and it doesn't make headlines, but it has the highest impact. Most of the advances in pure ranking that we're making aren't obvious to users -- they just find what they're looking for more often and they take it for granted. Just the way it should be.

In addition to the fundamentals, we are involved in dozens of efforts in new areas. I wish I could brag about all the cool stuff we're doing, but I won't until it's done.

Your colleague Adam Bosworth and I had a long chat recently about his work on Health. It strikes me one of the more interesting areas of search might be in domain specific search, like health. You can do things with structured results and deep knowledge of a person's information needs in that kind of environment. Would you agree that this is an area where devoting significant resources makes sense?

Of course. What's more important than health?

As you know, we improved the search results for health-related queries with Google Co-op, which launched last year. If you search, for example, for diabetes, we'll offer refinements at the top of the page (treatment, symptoms, tests, risk factors, for patients, for health professionals, etc.). We are working with the major health organizations and we put special emphasis on ranking of health-related queries. A lot more work on health is being done by Adam and his team.

Given the approach of universal search, how does domain specific fit in? I mean, given that Google is bringing all search results to one place ( google.com) how does domain specific stuff like Health fit into the Google master plan?

The universal search vision is about including results of all types in the best possible way on one page -- the main search results page. It does not mean that we will not invest in improving search for particular types of data, in fact it's the opposite. By building the infrastructure for universal search and by giving every type of result the prominence it deserves we make it easier for the search group and other groups within Google to highlight the best results. We are also working on giving users specialized access to different types of data. The ranking and presentation of local information are different from that of, say, video or news. We now give users the option to play a video directly from the search results page and see a map directly on the search results page. Once you follow the link into our maps area, for example, we provide a very rich experience (with maps, satellite images, and now street view images, all integrated). One of the most important goals of the universal search project is to build new ways to handle specific data types, like maps, images, scholarly articles, or health.

Do you see Google creating stand alone destination sites around search separate from google.com?

My job is to improve search on Google.com.

Well defelected, Mr. Manber. Thanks!

BoingBoing rounds up *very* interesting reader input on the implications of Street View.

Google and Ebay: gearing up for audio ads.

Sk*rt - "Digg for chicks."

Ask's commercial leaked by TC.

Whitacre still stirring the pot, though he does not have a company pot to piss in anymore (he's retired from AT&T)...

Joi: Media companies are driving the boom.

Clip and Sling. Hell yes, this is what I've been talking about for years.

Am on the road and probably posting lightly today. Hola, LA.....

'nuff said.

Ars has the news:

Google has a voracious appetite for parallel computing power, and that's Peakstream's business. My bet is that the company plans to use Peakstream's software internally. I think it's also possible that Peakstream will continue to operate and to make its middleware available to customers. So if I were Peakstream competitor RapidMind, I wouldn't uncork the champagne just yet. RapidMind's lives just got either a whole lot easier or a whole lot tougher.

More on Peakstream and Google (Ask News)

Peakstream's site is down, but here's a (Google) cache.

I can't stop thinking about this, mainly because I'm convinced it's a key turning point in how mankind interacts with computers. Yeah, it's joints after midnight stuff, and it's only six pm on a Tuesday night, but what the hell. I'll put a place holder here and get back to it...

Readers of this site and others like it are already well versed in the ongoing conversation around the "Google OS." While that's a fascinating topic, it's one layer below what is presenting itself to us on an almost daily basis now - the interface level. The Web is the OS. Fine. So what does the UI look like?

One point of departure for me has been Firefox and its endless flexibility. A good thing, no? We can add all sorts of cool shit to it, and new stuff keeps coming out, from mainstream stuff like Google Notebook to custom Greasemonkey scripts.

Well, I'm sorry, but none of that is going to matter. It's all way too hard, way too kludgy, and way too complicated. I can't figure out Greasemonkey, and I don't want to (nor do I know why I should). And even when you do get it to work, it's pretty lame, as interfaces go. It's kind of like the early releases of Windows - based on DOS, and not very elegant. I want something that blows all this away. I want the Mac OS for the Web. A sea change.

Don't you all?

You'll love what Philippe has done.

Check this out:
Google now (well, depending on if you use 'iGoogle')

and Lisa, the precursor to the Mac, then:

Brilliant, Philippe (thanks, Brandon).

Rumored for weeks, this partnership sounds interesting. From TC:

Salesforce and Google will be starting an extended partnership encompassing marketing and distribution of their products across 43 countries. It will begin with the integration of Google Adwords and Salesforce’s lead generation tools into a new application called “Group Edition”, available here. Group edition replaces Salseforces earlier version Team edition.

dashboardsmall.pngGroup Edition will enable Adwords users to track Adsense referrals to their site and build up a customer profile based on a the data a user enters into a site and their navigation path. Businesses will handle their Adwords campaigns through Google, as usual, but Salesforce takes over from there. When potential customers click through to the businesses site, Google tells Salesforce what search terms brought the user to the page and where they navigate throughout the site.

This blog is based on Moveable Type (MT), from Six Apart. I love the software, but I also have had my issues with it. I'm very pleased to note that today Six Apart announced MT 4, a major new release, with tons of new features. Also notable is the MT Open Source project, which will culminate in an open source version of MT. Both will make MT more robust and will keep folks like me happy. Thanks SA!

Ask today launched Ask3D, which, according to documents sent to me by Ask, "synthesizes the best of our technologies across the three dimensions of search: Expression, Results and Content."

All this is based on a new algorithm called Morph, which according to the reviewer's guide, is "a new content-matching and ranking algorithm that literally transforms the entire page according to your unique query, presenting the right information, from the right sources, in the right place, at the right time. Morph, which deep-dives hundreds of structured databases, takes into account not only relevance based on source signals, but also previous user behavior for your query. Ask.com owns the patent on using click behavior to improve search relevance (via the DirectHit acquisition in 2000)."

Let me summarize it for you this way: This is Ask, a perennial 4th place player in an increasingly one player market, doing what only a 4th place player can do: Throwing caution to the wind and betting on a new interface, one that abandons the "ten blue links" approach that has dominated search for so long.

I use the term interface purposely: I have long wanted to opine on the future of the computing interface as it relates to search (I've hit on it here and there), but have not had the requisite Thinking Out Loud time. Now, Ask is forcing my hand: For it's clear that this new approach is a significant departure from ten plus years of search interface, and I for one can only say "it's about time." We've been slowly moving away from what I like to call the "DOS phase" of the search interface, and moving to the search equivalent of the Mac or Windows - a more robust, navigational approach to results that responds to queries using more of what humans are good at - combining visual, textual, and design elements to create meaning. It's why I got excited by A9, after all.

Sure, Google last week introduced Universal Search, and Yahoo and Ask and others have been integrating smart answers, binoculars, search suggestions, and all the rest for more than three years. But with Ask3D, Ask is trying a pretty evolved approach.

For starters, Ask has moved the query box from the top center to the left, and added a ton of real estate for the "query formulation" portion of search, which they call "expression." This honors what we all intrinsically know to be true - the hardest part of a search is often figuring out the right question. But it's a big risk - we're very used to having that box up and in the center (when you first hit ask.com it looks traditional, but once the first query is entered, the new interface shows up, see the first image above).

Google would never take such a risk with its entire user base - it has too much to lose. But Ask? Well, it can afford to. It's in 4th, remember?

Secondly, Ask has abandoned the time-honored tradition of giving away the third column on the right to ads (Ask had already done this, in fact, but now the real estate is well used, IMHO). Instead, they are integrated in the main column. The result is that the third column can be used for what Ask is calling "content" related to the query. This means images, or video, or news, or whatever seems most relevant beyond a static web page.

The middle column is what might be considered traditional "results." But from what I've seen from noodling on a demo site (the real site will be live at midnight EST tonight), when the three are combined, you get a new kind of search experience, one that feels, well, more like driving through real time results, and less like picking from a list. Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask, backs this sense of mine up with research the company did prior to rolling out the new approach, calling it a "complete transition of how people view the page."

It certainly is different, and I intend to grok it over the coming weeks to see how I adjust to this new interface grammar. Lanzone said Ask showed this new interface to a random selection of 5% of Ask's traffic, and they learned quite a bit. The first lesson was counterintuitive: users' number of queries per visit dropped. "They don't need to iterate as much," Lanzone told me. "They don't have to hunt and peck."

That's not good from a market share perspective ...unless folks start coming back to Ask and using it as their primary engine, which has always been Ask's problem - folks saw it as second fiddle to Google.

"Our issue is people use ask three times a month, and they use Google fifteen times a month," Lanzone said. "We need to get people to understand what is different about Ask."

Will that happen? Lanzone seems confident, because he believes his new interface addresses some core issues with search results: including site abandonment (people leaving before finding what they are looking for) and frequency of use, which he says spiked up in tests with the new interface.

Frequency of use and differentiation are key - in short, Ask must get folks to understand what is unique about Ask, and start seeing it as their primary engine. That's pretty critical when you're spending $100 million on marketing, after all.

I asked Jim about that marketing spend, including the controversial "Algorithm" campaign, which he said was not targeted at folks like those who read this blog, nor does it refer directly to Morph. "It's our farfegnugen," he said, aimed at the average searcher, not the tech elite.

There are a lot of changes being rolled out in "Ask3D" (the 3D refers to the three panel approach), and I'll let those better equipped than I explain them all, but a short list includes a much improved binocular feature (shown above), extensive use of AJAX, including the ability to play a video inline on the results page (video is provided by blinkx, and I was disappointed to see that Google Video is not indexed), skins (the first image above), integration of events and other data, and more.

As I use Ask over the next few weeks my main question comes to this: WIll this spiffy new interface scale down the tail? Will it be useful for all those long tail queries where, honestly, Google really does rule? Or will it just work for the "big" queries like Britney Spears, San Francisco restaurants, and the like?

My other main thought has to do with how Ask is emulating Apple. No, this is not an iPod or iPhone, but it does remind me of the Mac, pre iPod, when Apple had 5% share and was competing with a major competitor that had cornered the market (sound familiar?). How did Apple compete? A better interface, a very loyal group of users, and .... better marketing.

But, I asked Jim, isn't Google already heading in this direction with Universal Search? "What Google did was a step in the right direction," Lanzone retorted. "But it was a baby step. There is no good reason why in 2007 why the search result page should look like it did in 1996." I certainly agree with that.

It remains to be seen if this will move the needle for Ask. But even a one percent gain in share will be a major victory for the company. If, on the other hand, it loses a point, well...nothing ventured....nothing learned.

PS - For more from the horse's mouth, read Gary's post.

From the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog:

Yahoo! Search Marketing is rolling out a new feature that we think will help enhance the quality, potentially reduce the cost and increase the value of traffic to you, our advertisers. It’s called quality-based pricing, and it measures the quality of traffic coming from our distribution partners—that is, the web publishers large and small that display your ads.

Previously, you were charged the same for traffic from all web sites within our distribution network. Now, with quality-based pricing, you may be charged less for certain clicks than you otherwise would pay, depending on the overall quality of the traffic provided by our distribution partners. As a result, your click charges can decrease.

“Quality” is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of the ability of our partners’ sites to deliver more interested, valuable customers to you.

Welcome to the world of managing publisher expectations and naunce, Yahoo. This will be interesting...

The release is here, from it:

Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, today announced the Yahoo! Search Marketing Commercial API Program, which provides businesses and developers of all sizes free, open access to the "Panama" search marketing application program interfaces (APIs). Through this program, advertisers, developers and commercial partners including ad agencies and technology providers can easily build upon Yahoo!'s core search marketing technologies to enhance their existing business offerings or create brand new search marketing tools and applications. In addition, the program provides a range of value-added services to help commercial partners gain greater insight into Yahoo!'s search marketing product roadmap and fully leverage Yahoo! Search Marketing's APIs for their clients.

I missed this Post piece on "googlenoping" till today. The point is to find a phrase that does not exist in Google. Till of course you find it and blog it.

Per the story below, I have very good off the record source who says that while Sanaz is a true star, the project is not what has been reported. Trying to get more on what it *is*....stay tuned.

TC says yes:

Microsoft has gathered a team of twenty or more “rock star” developers who’ve been tasked at building their next generation search engine, a source has told us. The team, which supposedly came together recently, is based at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley headquarters in Mountain View.

We have few details on their approach to the product, other than hearing that it is definitely a “horizontal” engine (so, it’s not limited to a specific vertical like images), and is “very cool.”

What seems interesting as I catch up tonight:

Revealing The Sources Of Google News

Schmidt Calls Viacom's $1B Lawsuit "Just A Mistake"

Where 2.0: Microsoft Adds to the 3D Web

Live Search Books: Now with In-Copyright Content

Mike Volpi, new Joost CEO

StartupSearch

Google Maps zoom: here's the device and vehicle behind it

The future of the music business...again

TiVo prepping a "mass appeal" HD DVR priced below Series 3

Chad … I Am Your Father … [D5]

Lose the Scorecard

Google Street View: would it be more/less evil if it were CIA or NSA?

Best Wikipedia category EVER

Marc Andreesen, of Netscape and more recently Ning reknown, is blogging. Welcome Marc!

Interesting that Google has let the Times behind the curtain to interview Amit Singhal and Udi Manber, two of the high priests of Google's most important work - search ranking and quality. Saul Hansell, the author, called me for some thoughts and was kind enough to include a few of my thoughts in the piece.

Google recently allowed a reporter from The New York Times to spend a day with Mr. Singhal and others in the search-quality team, observing some internal meetings and talking to several top engineers. There were many questions that Google wouldn’t answer. But the engineers still explained more than they ever have before in the news media about how their search system works.

Indeed, for those of you who geek out on this stuff, there are clues to a number of things in here. Witness:

In 2005, Bill Brougher, a Google product manager, complained that typing the phrase “teak patio Palo Alto” didn’t return a local store called the Teak Patio.

So Mr. Singhal fired up one of Google’s prized and closely guarded internal programs, called Debug, which shows how its computers evaluate each query and each Web page. He discovered that Theteakpatio.com did not show up because Google’s formulas were not giving enough importance to links from other sites about Palo Alto.

It was also a clue to a bigger problem. Finding local businesses is important to users, but Google often has to rely on only a handful of sites for clues about which businesses are best. Within two months of Mr. Brougher’s complaint, Mr. Singhal’s group had written a new mathematical formula to handle queries for hometown shops.

There is also an interesting discussion of freshness and how that relates to ranking (watch for mentions of "QDF"). Worth the read.

Seeing this makes me happy. Franklin's Tower playing loud and it's a good day....

Scott Beale and Boing Boing are tracking the Easter Eggs or other funny things found in Street View - shots of Google's Street View team, for example, freaked out cat owners, dead guys. New sites like streetviewr are popping up to track all this...my favorite: Honestly, I was just looking at her coffee...

How long till this becomes live video? Think about this for a moment. I am quite sure the NSA and the CIA are....

Jangl - Call Anyone For Free!

Google to Acquire Social Community Photo Sharing StartUp - PANORAMIO

World's Top Junkmail Spammer Arrested in Seattle

NBA Adsense Video Player

The Google blog:

We're very pleased to tell you that we've just acquired FeedBurner.

For those of you who aren't bloggers, podcasters, or feed creators, Chicago-based FeedBurner is a leading provider of feed distribution and management tools. A web feed is a way for online publishers to syndicate their content and deliver it straight to readers. Each day, FeedBurner delivers feeds to millions of users around the world and offers unique and useful tools for publishers to analyze, optimize, and monetize their content. Further, FeedBurner offers a feed advertising platform for advertisers to reach engaged feed readers through targeted in-feed ads and innovative techniques like RSS feed-driven ads.

We're excited to continue offering the exceptional tools of FeedBurner to content creators throughout the world, and our teams will work together to improve the experiences of feed users, advertisers, and publishers. You can sign up for FeedBurner's services and take advantage of their feed tools and features immediately.

Feedburner's blog has tons more.

I missed posting on this news due to travel, but here's an analysis from SEL:

The Gears initiative is about creating an open standard to help turn the Web browser into a better, richer development platform and enabling applications to work "offline," when there's an inconsistent or non-existent Internet connection.

Fundamentally it bridges the current gap between the browser and desktop software.

Sergey Brin, in a roundtable interview with press after the morning session yesterday, specifically deflected competitive questions about Microsoft and said instead that the company was responding to user feedback and unmet needs in rolling out Gears. He said that there had been a "huge uptake" in Google Docs and that users wanted the ability to work with these tools offline.

From Bloomberg:

Google Inc.'s YouTube, the most- popular video-sharing Web site, struck an agreement with EMI Group Plc to show clips from artists including Coldplay and Fat Boy Slim.

Consumers will be able to watch professionally produced videos and user-generated spots featuring EMI music, San Bruno, California-based YouTube said today in an e-mailed statement. EMI, YouTube and musicians will share advertising sales.