Month: November 2008

Google Says No Mas to Yahoo Deal

Release: Yahoo! Announces Termination of Services Agreement by Google SUNNYVALE, Calif., November 5, 2008 – Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that Google has terminated the advertising services agreement the companies announced in June. Yahoo! continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement…

Release:

Yahoo! Announces Termination of Services Agreement by Google

SUNNYVALE, Calif., November 5, 2008 – Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that Google has terminated the advertising services agreement the companies announced in June. Yahoo! continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement and is disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court. Google notified Yahoo! of its refusal to move forward with implementation of the agreement following indication from the Department of Justice that it would seek to block it, despite Yahoo!’s proposed revisions to address the DOJ’s concerns.

While the implementation of the services agreement with Google would have enabled Yahoo! to accelerate its investments in its top business priorities through an infusion of additional operating cash flow, this deal was incremental to Yahoo!’s product roadmap and does not change Yahoo!’s commitment to innovation and growth in search. The fundamental building blocks of a stronger Yahoo! in both sponsored and algorithmic search were put in place independent of the agreement.



Google’s blog post

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But Before I Go…

I just learned my next piece is up over at the Looksmart series. It's a rumination of sorts…. In ten short years, Google has become our social glue – we all presume that two people, asking roughly the same question, will get pretty much the same answer, and that…

I just learned my next piece is up over at the Looksmart series. It’s a rumination of sorts….

In ten short years, Google has become our social glue – we all presume that two people, asking roughly the same question, will get pretty much the same answer, and that answer will be correct. For most of the past decade, that was a pretty fair assumption. Google has become a universal search resource, reliable, accurate, and … consistent.

But for a variety of reasons, that assumption is no longer true. The ongoing goal of all search providers has been to personalize search – to tailor answers to the individual who is doing the searching. Search no longer takes one signal – your query – and finds results against the entire web. Instead it takes many signals – your search history, your geographic location, things you’ve clicked on in the past, files on your hard drive (if you allow it), and many others – and processes those signals against probable sub sets of data that have a higher chance of providing *you* the best answer. And that answer, increasingly, will be quite different from someone else’s, even if that other person asks exactly the same question.

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Into the Cyclone…(Web 2)

I'm gathering up my stuff and driving over to SF this afternoon. I'll be hosting Web 2 for the next three and a half days, and I imagine posting will be light here. You can follow me on Twitter and also follow Web2Summit….

I’m gathering up my stuff and driving over to SF this afternoon. I’ll be hosting Web 2 for the next three and a half days, and I imagine posting will be light here. You can follow me on Twitter and also follow Web2Summit.

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It’s One DataPoint. But It Ain’t Great for PPC

A reader sent me this: In September, we reported online sales were holding steady across our client base. As November begins, the situation has become bleaker. Across much of our client base, we see significant signs of the economic slowdown. For background, our agency manages search for over 100…

A reader sent me this:

In September, we reported online sales were holding steady across our client base. As November begins, the situation has become bleaker. Across much of our client base, we see significant signs of the economic slowdown.

For background, our agency manages search for over 100 clients, mostly online retailers, mostly B2C. Our clients spend about $100 million combined on paid search clicks annually.

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Yahoo Google Deal- News

From a Weisel report emailed to me just now: On Monday (11/3) after the close, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google and Yahoo have submitted to the Department of Justice a revised version of their proposed search agreement. While we see little legal reasoning behind blocking the deal,…

From a Weisel report emailed to me just now:

On Monday (11/3) after the close, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google and Yahoo have submitted to the Department of Justice a revised version of their proposed search agreement. While we see little legal reasoning behind blocking the deal, we believe the DOJ is basically saying that Yahoo can’t be trusted to do the right thing for its business over the long term.

Shortened Duration: The reported revised plan shortens the partnership from 10 years to 2 years, forcing Yahoo to avoid lowering its search monetization capability if the company can’t rely on Google for a decade.

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So…Why Is Google Reminding Folks How to Block Advertisers…Now?

Check this out from the AdSense blog: When we notice a spike in readers who are interested in a specific topic, we like to address it as soon as we can. There's been some interest in filtering ads from publisher pages, so here's a quick refresher on the filtering…

Check this out from the AdSense blog:

When we notice a spike in readers who are interested in a specific topic, we like to address it as soon as we can. There’s been some interest in filtering ads from publisher pages, so here’s a quick refresher on the filtering tools we offer:

Competitive Ad Filter

You can restrict contextually-targeted and placement-targeted ads from appearing on your pages by adding the URL of each ad to your Competitive Ad Filter. After logging in to your account, click the AdSense Setup tab and visit the ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ page. You can also find full instructions and tips for entering in specific URLs in our Help Center. To determine the URL of an ad, try the AdSense Preview Tool or follow these steps. Please keep in mind that it may take several hours for the filter to take effect.

Look, I run a network of high end publishers, and many of them use Google and other remnant networks to backfill ad inventory. So I see this too. And I can give you exactly one reason why this came up. For those of you too lazy to click the link, Google came out against Proposition 8 a while back, and I applaud them for doing so. And the spike they are referring to? Most likely (I have not confirmed this) it’s because the Yes on Prop 8 folks are aggressively spending on Google right now, and a ton of publishers are seeing Yes on 8 ads on their site, and they don’t want to allow those ads.

For the record, I am openly against this proposition. If that means another group of readers (yeah, I am for Obama too) stop reading me because they think my views don’t fit theirs, well, sorry to see you go, folks. Most likely, most of you left me already given my views on the presidential electon. Somehow, I sense, in a decade or two, this will all seem like a pretty stupid debate.

Onwards.

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Facebook Lexicon on Election

Amr has a fun analysis. The Facebook Lexicon is a very nifty tool which analyzes the frequency and associations of words in Facebook wall messages for profiles, events, and groups. The first graph below shows that Obama is mentioned significantly more frequently than Mccain, and, more importantly, the second…

Amr has a fun analysis.

The Facebook Lexicon is a very nifty tool which analyzes the frequency and associations of words in Facebook wall messages for profiles, events, and groups. The first graph below shows that Obama is mentioned significantly more frequently than Mccain, and, more importantly, the second graph shows that the mentions for Obama have more positive sentiment (e.g. “I love Obama”), versus negative sentiment (e.g. “I hate McCain”).

Link to Lexicon on sentiment.

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