John Battelle's Searchblog

In which we leave the Vineyard for home, after seven weeks of being on the road. I'll post this weekend.

The third annual LaunchPad, where we highlight cool companies in our industry, is open for submissions. The release is here.

This year we're doing something new - having a panel of VC judges who critique your presentation on stage. It's a great chance for a handful of companies - 6 to 8 - to present in front of all 1200 of the Web 2 attendees and press/bloggers.

Also, we are not charging a fee to enter or win, and the competition is open to any company that is pre-public - not just companies who are launching. If you want to enter your company, head here.

Huh. Seems they've done their, er, book reading.

Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns—both paranoid and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America's AT&T and Verizon are miffed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the internet's equivalent of Hades after Google tweaked these algorithms.

And now come the politicians. Libertarians dislike Google's deal with China's censors. Conservatives moan about its uncensored videos. But the big new fear is to do with the privacy of its users.

This from the cover opinion piece. More on Google in the issue here. The conclusions and coverage are, well, familiar.

Paid Content has an overview. Also NYT.

I am tired of Yahoo's internal focus. I think I speak for many of us. Get back to being Yahoo.

Danny schools Scoble and shows us our own Gphone hype timeline.

FareCast launches hotels.

Google and MSFT hold hands on fair use.

A new news metasearch engine.

Google CFO George Reyes is stepping down. He's, er, quite well compensated for his nearly six years of service.
He's got good timing. The future for Google's new CFO is going to be rough: Think Microsoft after Windows had its initial run. Ho to keep the Street happy when it expects double digit growth every quarter. Ick.

Check it out!

It's the last days of summer. On my way back to the Vineyard for a few days before heading home. Wow, that summer went quickly...

I am traveling today and won't be posting much, quick news:

Bloglines has updated. (RWW)

So has Yahoo Mail (TC)

Oh, and Orkut (Vbeat)

Go Speed Racer! (A pal of mine is working on this film)

And slowly, creators get a better deal. From the NYT coverage of the South Park creators's novel ad revenue split-based deal with Viacom:

But what is likely to draw the most attention in Hollywood is not the richness of the pact, but the network’s willingness to share its advertising revenue.

..“The landscape has shifted dramatically,” Mr. Herzog said. “The way of the Web seems to be, there’s a very low barrier to entry, so you don’t need, necessarily, a major media company to be in business, or a movie studio, or whatever it is — you just need to be able to set up shop and go. You’re seeing a lot of guys doing this, funnyordie.com being the best example.” (Funnyordie.com was started this year by the comic actor Will Ferrell and his production partner, Adam McKay.)

Scoble's got some bold predictions in video about the future of search here. TC picks up here. I don't buy the Techmeme or Mahalo claims, but FaceBook? Could do.

It's really a thrilling time to be in the media business. YouTube and now FaceBook are hard at figuring out conversational media. I shoulda posted on this Friday, when I did my voicepost on the YouTube ad model. I'll voicepost on FaceBook's, based on this Journal article, soon. The article is behind a pay wall, so I'll summarize and then riff. But not now, as I have 12 family members in a small cottage to feed...

Continue reading "Reader JG Writes" »

Shocker.

(previously)

Google's got a bump in summer mobile traffic, Marissa says at SES (ars). I have to say, this is consistent with my usage - I use Google a lot on my BlackBerry.

I have to say, I don't see why a Gphone makes sense. Just ride the top of the platform that is already being built in mobile....

What do you guys think? You want a Gphone? You use Google a lot on your phones?

I have to just call out to HP, and say thanks for making this possible. It's a really cool way to market, by adding value to the conversation in a very real way.

Previous coverage of YouTube's new ad unit.

My main point: Innovative in execution: Yes, but like AdWords was - lots of stuff that already existed, but packaged and moved forward. Innovative in the business model? No. And for now, that's the right thing to do.

Have a listen:

One of my simple charms, those who work with me relate, is that I'm totally blind to obvious stuff when it comes to UI. It's like I'm interface handicapped or something. If there is a way I can break the interface, I break it.

With that in mind, is it really possible that no one in this great web world ever asked the question: "How Do You Create Comments In Adobe Reader?"

Apparently the answer is yes, no one ever has. Not even at Ask. Yeah, I know, lose the quotes and there will be more answers. But still.

Meanwhile, I am still wondering. Where is the flippin' comment tool?

Update: I love this, hours after I whined about no results:

Rich has chops in this space. A very good read.

We know this from experience: No one will ever go to Mahalo directly, just as no one ever went to About.com, dmoz, Tripadvisor, Nextag, IMDB or any other vertical or broad-but-shallow site. Google is where everyone starts and Mahalo's distribution strategy has to be SEO. Its traffic is going to live or die based on SEO skill and Google's continued favor.

Over at Ars:

Microsoft announced yesterday via the Windows Live Blog that it plans to extend its Content Ads beta program to all US customers who wish to advertise on MSN properties. Previously, the program was limited to a small selection of advertisers and the MSN sales team, but it will now be available to the public to test out starting on August 29. The ads will be displayed on select Microsoft properties—such as Real Estate, Money, MSN, and Windows Marketplace—and will eventually expand out to other Microsoft-owned properties and "premium partner sites." If Content Ads manage to take off as well as Google's AdSense program, then competition between Microsoft and Google could heat up and force both to offer even better options to advertisers and, eventually, publishers.

Watch and learn as Justin, an engineer at FM, figures out how to defang a sleazy blackhat!

It warms my heart to see functionality that once was reserved for Big Guys, like AOL, get spread out to everyone. Case in point: Used to be the only place you see embeddable maps was at large sites that had done licensing deals with MapQuest et al. Now, Google is making it possible for anyone to have embeddable maps.

This is great, but read the TOS. By using this, you are bound by Google's overall TOS, including I imagine its use of any

data your create through using this feature. And you are bound by some interesting Navteq policies (that's the data provider), which are, well, read the fine print. In short: Don't mess with them. They are particularly irritated by any hacking with regard to automobiles, thank you very much.

And don't even think about using this in a commercial manner. Er, but, what is commercial these days? I guess we'll see.

The strategy is clear. Local is a huge business play for any search driven company. And the more distribution you get, the better. Smart, eh?

Paul and Tim are partnering up for Money:Tech in NYC this Feb. Sounds great!

Customers weren't too happy with Google when it shut down Google Video. To its credit, Google responds:

We recently emailed you to let you know that Google is ending the
Google Video download to own/rent (DTO/DTR) program, and that
you'd receive a Google Checkout bonus equal to or greater than the
total amount of your Google Video purchases.

Since then, we've received feedback from people dissatisfied with
our approach to phase out the Google Video download to own/rent
program, so we've decided to take additional steps to address
these concerns:

1. We will fully refund your credit card for the total amount
of your Google Video purchases.
2. We're going to continue to support playing your videos
through February, 2008. We won't be offering the ability to buy
additional videos, but what you have already downloaded will
remain playable.
3. The Google Checkout bonus you've already received is yours
to keep. You can use your bonus at the following stores:
http://www.google.com/checkout/signupwelcome.html . Your bonus
expires on October 31, 2007, and the minimum purchase amount must
be equal to or greater than your bonus amount, before shipping and
tax.

Check out Microsoft's experimental engine, Tafiti ("to research" in Swahili, we are certainly running out of search names). You have to install Silverlight first (I covered this technology, an answer to Flash/Ajax, here and in particular here). Turns out, there's Silverlight for the Mac (WOW!).

So this is a play to do several things. One, to show off Silverlight. Fair enough - check out the Tree View, pictured here, kinda cool. Two, to execute a cool application that helps people share search sessions. From an email I got from Microsoft:

Tafiti helps people use the Web for research that spans multiple queries and sessions by helping them visualize, store and share the result. Search is becoming increasingly specialized, across different user scenarios, vertical subject areas and entry points. What works well for simple destination searches doesn’t necessarily work as well for more sophisticated research projects.

You can drag your results, literally, to a shelf on the right and store them, share them, etc.

And finally, well, if this works, it'll help create a database of metadata that might inform better search. It's all very As We May Think.

Here's the FAQ.

Instead of pre roll or post roll, Google and YouTube come up with an overlay with integrated player. For now it's only with select partners on select videos (ie, the commercial ones). The really interesting question is when/how this will scale to the tail. I'll comment on it more later, for now, read the Merc...

And take a look at this pic:

and this explanation of how it works from the overview sent to me by YT:

There is a lot going on, but I'll write about it later. Today I am taking off.

PageRank was based on a big graph: the links that make up the web. The next breakthrough, many argue, will be based on the social graph, the links between us all. Facebook is clearly based on this insight. If you are interested in this issue, and feel it's important (I do, in particular, who owns and profits from this information), read this write up from Brad Fitzpatrick who, it turns out, started at Google....today. Also working on this is David Recordon, who is going to Six Apart to work on these ideas. Interesting!

From the release:

comScore, Inc. , a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced the launch of comScore qSearch 2.0, the second generation of search measurement. Previously, the search universe was defined as searches occurring at the major Web search engines. With search becoming a more ubiquitous activity across the Web, comScore is expanding the market view of the search universe to encompass other searches that occur on the Internet.

comScore's qSearch 2.0 interface will provide clients with an in-depth view of the search universe in the U.S. and worldwide that encompasses:

-- Core Search Engines -- the five major U.S. search engines (i.e. Google
Sites, Yahoo! Sites, Microsoft Sites, Ask Network and Time Warner
Network).
-- Top 50 properties worldwide where search activity is observed, which
includes sites such as MySpace, Baidu, and Naver.
-- Major "vertical" search locations -- such as eBay and Amazon in retail
and Expedia in travel.
-- Partner Search -- searches initiated at partner sites that redirect the
visitor to a search engine site.
-- Cross-Channel Search -- counts multiple searches when employing more
than one search tab (e.g. Web, images, news) for a single search term.
-- Local Search -- maps, directions, and local directory listings.
-- Worldwide Search -- includes comprehensive reporting of worldwide
search, with individual country reporting for the U.S., Canada, Mexico,
U.K., France, Germany, Japan, China, and Korea. Additional countries
will follow.

The Times piece today adds a nice narrative flourish,keying off AOL's results, on the idea I've been talking about for some time now: That a new form of media is rising, and it's one that the portals are not quite sure how to deal with. (For more on conversational media, see these posts).

As advertising is moving from offline media to the Internet at a rapid clip, portals, which command some of the biggest audiences online, should be among the top beneficiaries. Instead, the travails of the mass market portals like AOL, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, indicate a decline in power....

...Part of the challenge for portals is that people are starting to approach the Internet in a different way. A new generation of Web users has grown increasingly adept at finding what it wants online and is less reliant on portals for guidance. What is more, younger audiences are spending more time on social networking sites and less time on traditional Internet portals.

...Social networking sites are not the only culprits. Thousands of smaller Web sites, like blogs, news collectors and niche content sites, are also attracting growing numbers of Internet users and advertisers.

Yup.

The trademark question keeps on keeping on. Friday American Airlines sued Google for trademark infringement. This is the same kind of suit that so far has gotten nowhere, recall American Blinds and the tons of others like it. When you look at the kind of companies that come up when you do a search for "aa.com" or "American Airlines," however, they are not United or Delta. They are cheap-o (literally) AdSense arbitrage services that perhaps irritate American because they subvert the airline's ability to gouge its customers by directing searchers directly to the AA website.

Just a thought.

Fun profile of Jason in FC.

Folks thought they had bought videos for life, but Google turned it off. Folks thought they had a phone number for life, but now, not so much. Google knew this was coming, but it's sure not good PR.

I've got pals at both companies, and our authors at FM use both (I use MT). I've always wondered about whether the grass is greener, here's Mashable's handy review of both.

After tallying it all up, Wordpress comes out on top beating Movable Type in many areas.

Overall, Movable Type is a well put-together offering by SixApart definitely warranting a try: we’d say it’s actually superior for no-nonsense business people who want a professional solution fast. However, Wordpress is the stronger offering for the general user with great features and an unsurpassed community.

In a few months, as Movable Type heads towards greater openness, we think the gap will be closed. MT will certainly be worth another look around that time. And frankly, if you plan to spend many years with your blog platform of choice, why not try out both and see which one you prefer?

I've been arguing this for quite some time, along slightly different lines.

(image)
Having had multiple brushes with serious injury, several involving my spine, I've come to the conclusion that the most important organ in the process of healing is your brain, no matter where the injury is. This piece in the Washington Post really intrigues me. A fellow who has an artificial heart claims he has lost the ability to feel emotions. He feels "cold hearted."

I think this is all in his head. And I have no right to say that, as I'm no expert. But that's what I think.

Truveo, which AOL bought some time ago, has relaunched today. More coverage here and here.

It's a short story, but I wanted to note it as we see what Microsoft will do in search in the coming 12 months. From Reuters:

"Over the next 12 months, we've got a very aggressive engineering plan with multiple releases of search coming forward. So, I think we are on a positive trajectory," (Microsoft President Kevin) Johnson said in an interview.

Ken gives us a good one, in this early (Aug 12) piece on the lesson of Google shutting down video purchases.

See, after Google takes its video store down, its Internet-based DRM system will no longer function. This means that customers who have built video collections with Google Video offerings will find that their purchases no longer work. This is one of the major flaws in any DRM system based on secrets and centralized authorities: when these DRM data warehouses shut down, the DRM stops working, and consumers are left with useless junk.

Philipp's got em.

Nice post showing trends in online ad spend vs. offline.

Put differently, U.S. advertising revenue at all 19 companies increased 8% year over year in Q2, to $13.8 billion ($55 billion annualized). The online portion of this pie grew from $3 billion to $4.2 billion (23% share to 30% share). The offline portion, meanwhile, shrank from $9.9 billion to $9.6 billion (77% share to 70% share). The online companies, in other words, picked up 7 percentage points of market share in a single year.

Allan Leinwand over at GigaOm (Allan is a partner at Panorama Capital) suggests Google should buy Adobe, to secure a position in video with Flash, among other reasons. This is one of the reasons we have Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, at Web 2 again this year. It's a very interesting time to be Adobe.

Looky here! All that hype, nothing of it, now this. (Via TechDirt).

In a study on customer satisfaction, anyway. (CNET)

Of its many properties, I've found Yahoo's Local the most useful. Today the site got another upgrade. From the release:

Sunnyvale, CA – August 15, 2007 – Yahoo! Local (http://local.yahoo.com) unveiled a new look today, announcing a more robust relevancy algorithm and several new product features to focus in on what people want to know about most – what’s best and closest to them. The new version also offers users the ability to comment on reviews; one of several features designed to create more vocal and active user communities. Additional features being launched draw from the deep Yahoo! Local database of events, local businesses, and user ratings and reviews.

New features launched today on Yahoo! Local include:

· Weekender – Offers a weekly selection of events, movies (including show times and reviews), dining picks, Flickr photos, and more to help people plan their weekends.
· Comment on User Reviews – Gives the option of adding comments to user reviews, adding a new level of user-engagement and authenticity to reviews.
· Improved Relevancy Algorithm – Makes search results even more accurate by effectively taking user reviews and other UGC-related items into consideration.
· More “Local Buzz” – Shows the top-moving search terms in your hometown with a new search cloud and exposes the most recent reviews of businesses in your area to see what people are buzzing about.
· Best Local Events – Taps into the Upcoming social events database to include a more prominent display of the best events in your hometown. New venue pages also integrate upcoming events and more detailed venue information.
· Most Popular – Highlights the best of a city in the key categories of Restaurants, Health & Beauty, and Home & Garden.
· My Local Improvements – A new “save for later” feature allows people to save businesses or events to their My Local profile. The added ability to upload a user photo or avatar is designed to create a more personal and vibrant user community.

I missed this (MarketingVox) while traveling to the Doc's:

A string of announcements, unintended quotes and other moves have led to the early unveiling of a new music purchasing service.

A correction has been made to this story. The gBox is a product purveyed by Navio with ads served by Google; it is not itself a Google product.

First came the news that Universal Music Group would begin selling DRM-free music through a variety of outlets. Rhapsody, Best Buy and Amazon were all named partners in offering tracks from UMG, which would be in MP3 format and priced at $.99 a piece.

The non-inclusion of Apple's iTunes as a place for the songs was a direct slap in the face of the company, which UMG has been sparring with recently.

Some time ago the label announced it would not renew its long-term contract with Apple, opting to go day-to-day. Universal has been among the loudest calling for a new - preferably variable - pricing model on iTunes, which Apple has steadfastly refused to address.

With all this comes news of the trump card, the gBox by Navio. The gBox serves DRM-free music, courtesy of Universal, as well as ads from Google.
While gBox is not a music storefront in and of itself, it's awfully close. Users who search for the name of a Universal artist or band will be shown an ad, bought by Universal, that takes them to where they can buy the song. Google then gets a percentage of all referrals.

I will be getting smarter on this soon, and report back as soon as I can (embargoes, etc. will delay the reporting). In short, this is Google proving its PPA model, and doing os in a way that might make Eric's board meetings at Apple a bit uncomfortable for a while.

PeekYou relaunches today. I've played a bit with it, the release claims it's better than everyone else, I don't see it. The bar ain't too high right now. Who out there is going to start to scrape all the social networks and get this right? OR is someone already and I'm missing it? PeekYou says it can do it:

A PeekYou profile helps other people find your websites, social-networking pages, photos, or anything else about you online. You can also create a profile for friends or relatives to ensure that they may also be easily found online.

But it didn't find my LinkedIn, MySpace, or Facebook page. It's not like I'm hard to find....

Google's long known that scale means leverage in its search results, and it's also getting very good at doing the same in its financial results. Check this note from Bill Morrison at JMP Securities:

Google Inc. (GOOG - $508.60): Google increases monetization without sacrificing search quality or user experience; reiterate Market Outperform rating and $625 price target. On August 8, 2007, Google announced a significant change in its formula for determining when ads can be promoted to the top (north) position – above the organic search results – from the slots to the right (east) position of the organic search results. Our analysis, detailed in the note below, suggests that the new monetization algorithm could drive Google’s gross revenue 2-4% higher. Google only promotes ads from the east to the north position when ads meet both a minimum quality score (CTR estimate) AND a minimum effective CPM (eCPM) threshold, which is calculated as follows: CTR * CPC * 1000. Previously, when checking whether an ad’s eCPM exceeded the threshold for north promotion, Google used the advertiser’s actual CPC paid, which is typically $0.01 above the next highest bid in the auction, in the CPM calculation. The actual CPC paid is often well below the max CPC bid by an advertiser. Under the new system, Google will change its eCPM calculation by using a CPC that is equal to, or less than, the advertiser’s max bid CPC. This change will result in increases to advertisers’ actual CPC paid when a CPC that is equal to or less than the advertiser’s max bid CPC generates an eCPM that exceeds the threshold eCPM required for north promotion. In addition to the CPC increase, there will be a CTR increase associated with this ranking change that should have an even greater monetization impact. Our research suggests that ads in the north position can generate 2x the CTR of ads in the east position.

In short, fiddling the dials just a bit can mean much better financial results.

Remember my post with the xrays of my hand, signing the praises of my surgeon (Dr. Keith Raskin)? Well today I realized I didn't even put his name in the post, and went to go fix it. Then I wondered if he came up first in Google, often doctors are old school and hard to find in search. But in fact, he was there alright. The first result was this. I wondered, as I put his name into Searchblog, how long it'd take for the post to show up? And at what rank will it land?

So the clock is ticking, it's 9 am EST on the 15th of August.....

Just for fun, here's the link to a Google search for "Dr Keith Raskin"

Holy shit, in less than 5 minutes, the post is there when you search for dr keith raskin battelle.

Those Google spiders are all over my site.

The Times covers Microsoft and Google's ambitions in health today, and Gary points us to health related news from Ask today as well.

Ross sent me this link: "SGER: A Music Search Engine Based on Aesthetic Similarity"

It's a grant the National Science Foundation recently funded. From the abstract:

This SGER project aims to develop a prototype music search engine based on identifying aesthetic similarities. This engine will utilize power-law metrics to extract statistical proportions of music-theoretic and other attributes of music pieces (e.g., Pitch, Duration, Pitch Distance, Duration Distance, Melodic Intervals, Harmonic Intervals, Melodic Bigrams, etc.).
The engine searches for pieces that are aesthetically similar to the input piece using a mean squared error (MSE) approach. Preliminary testing has been done using the Classical Music Archives corpus (14,695 MIDI pieces), combined with 500+ MIDI pieces from other styles (e.g. Jazz, Rock, Country, etc.). Similar metrics have already been validated on aesthetic attributes of textual materials. Text results (author attribution, style identification, and pleasantness prediction) indicated an high level of accuracy.

Sounds cool!

Wow. Had a check in with my doctor (update: that'd be Dr. Keith Raskin), a week after surgery. Things are going really well! Check out the before (note the far right lower bone, busted into three pieces - it's hard to see the third, but it's behind):

And the after (note the three screws):

It's really amazing. I have NO pain.

Driving home from Edgartown, coming into Vineyard Haven, I spied this car. Whose is it?! Kevin lives in CA, Jay lives in NY....

This rather pedestrian news, reported by SEL, strikes me as possibly more interesting when you consider that Amazon's EC2 and S3 are getting serious traction.

In short, Google, which made its entire reputation in mail on the idea of "(nearly) unlimited storage" is now rolling out the ability to pay for more storage.
The new service includes photo service Picasa.

Interesting.

That's the money line from an interview with Sep Kamvar, who leads Google's search personalization strategy, in RWW.

Owen Thomas, who has got to be the best person possible to write this story, really nails it in this piece on the reprieve for Business 2.0, which I wrote for, and for which I root (thanks for the tip, Alex). This is particularly good:

The question, though, is why? Did social media save the magazine? Perhaps so, in a roundabout way. The Facebook group "I Read Business 2.0 -- and Want to Keep Reading!" numbers more than 2,000 people, but that's hardly enough for Time Inc. honchos, who deal with magazine circulations numbering in the millions, to pay notice. But Facebook, with its early-adopter audience, may have proved an ideal way to get the attention of serious prospective buyers.

Everything's up in the air, of course. Time Inc.'s top brass could decide to refuse the offers. They could proceed with plans to fold some of the staff into Fortune. They could even -- though this seems unlikely -- decide that the buyers have a good idea in wanting to own the magazine, and reconsider holding onto it.

This much is clear, however. Business 2.0 has gone, overnight, from certain death to an uncertain life. It's the kind of back-from-the-brink business-revival story that I used to read all the time. In the pages, naturally, of Business 2.0.

I have been through this period in a magazine's life. It is not always fun. No. It's never fun. But you know what, it should be. I have the sense that Quittner and his troops see it just as Owen does - it's a great story. Live it to the fullest. It's going to be remembered as an important time in your life someday.

Sergey must have been serious about cutting back products (thanks KK):

As a valued Google user, we're contacting you with some important
information about the videos you've purchased or rented from Google Video.
In an effort to improve all Google services, we will no longer offer the
ability to buy or rent videos for download from Google Video, ending the
DTO/DTR (download-to-own/rent) program. This change will be effective
August 15, 2007.
As a valued Google user, we're contacting you with some important
information about the videos you've purchased or rented from Google Video.
In an effort to improve all Google services, we will no longer offer the
ability to buy or rent videos for download from Google Video, ending the
DTO/DTR (download-to-own/rent) program. This change will be effective
August 15, 2007.

Fascinating, via Philipp.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has a very nice post about not only his company's new, ultra fast chip, but two radical shifts to his company's business model. It's very well done.

So when we announce (via this webcast) the fastest microprocessor the industry's ever seen (the benchmarks are staggering) - and say we're entering the "commodity microprocessor market," what does it really mean? It means we're no longer limiting ourselves to serving an internal market, inside Sun. Instead, we're opening ourselves up to the broadest market possible - where the opportunity's largest.

Despite having what's arguably the single biggest competitive advantage our systems business has ever had, we've separated out our microelectronics business - and told them to win on the open market, as well. ....

....To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2 (I personally like the moniker, "Niagara 2" - named after Niagara Falls, btw, and the great volumes of water that pass over them), the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL. Making Niagara 2 the only commodity silicon whose core designs are available to the open source community - whose strength, and market power, only grows by the day.

These are all huge changes to our business. Driven by a simple philosophy: the open market is bigger than any internal one. But ultimately, why now? A simple reason: because customers building infrastructure for the internet have been asking us to do so.

Matt points out that Google's indexing speed has increased and uses blog entries as an example. I've certainly noticed how fast Google indexes this blog, it's markedly faster than a year ago.

This is very interesting, an interview with the head of revenue at MySpace.

A birdie told me the people search engine Spock opens its doors Weds morning...more coverage from me here, here. And Tim here; and the rest of the world here.

Interview here. Have not had time to grok but thought you all might...

So says a report from Veronis Suhler. 2011 is the year, the firm claims, for Net ad revenues to surpass newspaper revenues. I am certain it will happen faster.

(image from the Telegraph) I just do not believe Google is going to get into the hardware business with phones. Service, apps, platform, sure. But a phone? I don't believe it.

But if you read the press, it seems Google has already decided to go for it. Read this lead and headline in the Telegraph:

Google to unveil phone of its own by next year

By Sophie Freeman
Last Updated: 2:29am BST 04/08/2007

Google is hoping to launch a mobile phone early next year that allows users to surf the internet on the move.

Er....the company is hoping? What the hell kind of journalism is this? What sourcing does the paper have? None, it turns out. Buried in story is this gem:

The company refused to confirm any plans for the phone.

I dislike this kind of speculative journalism. It's just hype. Phoney.

Accoona, a search engine and, apparently, an ecommerce business, has filed for an IPO, Paid Content alerts us.

To my mind, this smells like opportunism, after all, the search engine has gotten very little traction and the company has no profits. That's the kind of IPO that got us into trouble last time. The offering is dressed in a Google like auction process to boot. So I took a quick look at the S1. It's clear from first blush, this is not a search company. Sure, they have a search engine, but what revenues they have they seem to have purchased - and they are all ecommerce sites. And while the S1 speaks of six sites that provide its revenues, I can't find them listed anywhere. I'll keep looking, but if you all can find em, let us know.

Acconna is also playing the "China is hot" card by playing up a deal with the China Daily Information Company.

Furthermore, the company is losing a lot of money, and seems on track to lose a lot more. They lost $50 million last year, and lost nearly $15 million in the first quarter of this year.

More from the S1:

We are an Internet company engaged in three primary business lines — online-based lead generation, online search in the United States, Europe and China, and e-commerce consumer electronics retailing. Our services assist our users in finding the products, services and information they want, obtaining competitive pricing and making informed buying decisions. We use our expertise in technology, marketing and management to support and create efficiencies across our business lines, which are organized primarily into the following sectors:
• Online-based lead generation — We developed and operate ExchangePlaceTM, which we believe is one of the first U.S. online-based marketplaces that enables consumers to obtain offers from as many as four providers of services in which they are interested and allows providers to bid for the opportunity to contact qualified consumers, or leads, (i.e., those meeting the providers’ criteria), across a range of vertical markets. We believe that these leads are more valuable to providers because of the greater likelihood they will result in sales, thereby resulting in increased returns on investment, or ROI, for those providers.
• Search — We have developed and operate an artificial intelligence driven search engine in the United States, China and Europe. Our business plan contemplates the development of techniques to use our existing technologies to enable our users to better access certain specialized search markets. In addition, we operate a shopping comparison search engine, BuyersEdge.com, that allows shoppers to search for and compare products and prices available at numerous online merchants.
• E-commerce — We operate six Internet retail websites offering primarily a wide selection of consumer electronics and home appliances, backed by customer service and support. According to a report in TWICE, in 2006, the combined revenues of our e-commerce sites made us one of the top 10 consumer-direct electronics retailers in North America by online revenue and one of the top 55 consumer electronics retailers overall.

Update: Silicon Alley Insider goes a bit deeper. Ouch.

...so I can't see it. But for those of you who can, head here. It promises cool images/approaches of the space shuttle and its support structures.

Apparently Paul Allen is throwing his hat into the next generation semantic search game. From this blog posting (thanks reader Charles), we learn that

Hypertext Solutions, a Seattle startup in stealth mode (they are hiring), has purchased the assets of a search technology called InFact (original page is dead, here is a Google cache) from Insightful Corp. The release is here.

Paul Allen is reportedly behind Hypertext Solutions. I am not finding it easy to confirm that. However, the blog posting, from a fellow involved in the tranasction, says Hypertext Solutions is "building upon the world's best NLP based text analysis and search platform". I've got some feelers out...

Udpate, yeah, it's easy - Vulcan is an investor.

Google spokeperson Gabriel Sticker gives a short interview on BeetTV about Google's approach to video search. Worth a quick watch...

I must have been under a rock, because I missed the news that Doug Cutting (of Lucene and Nutch fame) is now at Yahoo, and working on supporting Hadoop, which is "a software platform lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data."

Tim covers this well, writing:

...why is Yahoo!'s involvement so important? First, it indicates a kind of competitive tipping point in Web 2.0, where a large company that is a strong #2 in a space (search) realizes that open source is a great competitive weapon against their dominant competitor. It's very much the same reason why IBM got behind Eclipse, as a way of getting competitive advantage against Sun in the Java market. (If you thought they were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts rather than clear-sighted business logic, think again.) If Yahoo! is realizing that open source is an important part of their competitive strategy, you can be sure that other big Web 2.0 companies will follow.

I saw this headline in the paper version of the Times yesterday, and noted I should read it. It had to be the business section, because the headline read:

"When the Bay of Fundy Swells, a River Roller Coaster Begins"

I figured it had to be a tongue in cheek send up of Web 2 funding practices, right?

Nope. It's an article about river rafting in Nova Scotia. But boy, it sounds about right, doesn't it?

It's still hard to type with this splint, but I have been reading what I missed over the past few days, here's what I find worthy:

Ars: Microsoft testing ad supported Office suite.

BB: No fly lists work, really, govt claims, but how is a secret....I love this line of thinking.

Google phone fantasies won't die (Digg)

Om: Answers.com loses 28% of its traffic due to Google moving butt cheek one way or another.

Notes from a lunch with Google's Susan Wojcicki, I was invited but was traveling, Philipp has the story.

I really can't wait to fly Virgin America. (Radar)

Searchable database of tech events, since I know you guys go to a lot of em...(ResearchBuzz)

Ask swaps allegiances - aQuantive over Doubleclick, ie, Microsoft over Google. (NextNet)

An older IDG News story points out that the Google/AP deal, which was announced a year ago and caused much speculation about plans to turn Google News into a money making service, has yielded nothing new. In that deal the two companies announced that new products and services would be forthcoming based on Google's new license to use AP material.

A more jaundiced view might be that Google paid AP to keep AP from suing, and to preserve Google News' ability to crawl and re-use AP intellectual property. But in order to not have to do this for everyone, the deal was structured in a way that appears that Google's intent was to create new products. However, that has not occurred.

When describing the AP deal a year ago, Google said that it was intended to let Google use original AP content in a broader manner than in Google News for future features and products.

"We are very excited about the innovative new products we will build with full access to this [Associated Press] content," Google said in a statement then. "Google News is fully consistent with fair use and always has been."

However, the licensing deal is now more than a year old -- it had been signed a few months before it was actually announced in August of last year -- and the promised new Google services and features are nowhere to be seen.

On Wednesday, a Google spokesman confirmed the AP deal hasn't produced any new offerings yet.

My original coverage...clarification from ZDNet...

Happy Friday! My cast comes off today. Assuming I can use a few fingers on my right hand (prognosis is good) I'll be back posting soon...

Again, typing is tough so I'll let John McKinley do the talking, the entire thing is really worth a read:

The challenge with this approach is fourfold:

1. We lost the impact of some of the tips and techniques we had developed as a “veneer” player that maximized the revenue we could get from high-value searches - maybe that will be offset by the private label adwords, but maybe not…

2. Over time, the average consumer is going to develop more of a tendency to just go to google.com directly - I certainly have begun doing that. The value of AOL as part of the value chain in the eyes of the consumer is getting pretty minimal.

3. It under-leverages AOL’s ability to deliver unique rich content assets from within the TWX network.

4. It is, by its nature, defensive in nature - how could you possibly grow search share materially this way?