Powered by

Movable Type 3.34

You are browsing the Of Note in Search Biz category

Of Note in Search Biz

-->

June 30, 2004

MSFT Drops Paid Inclusion

ms_masthead_ltrEmerging from book haze because I can finally post on this...it's been in the works for sometime, but MSFT is, as previously reported, updating and redesigning MSN search. Chief among the changes: The company is abandoning paid inclusion. This is a big deal: Google has (rightly) made hay for years as the white hat in search, committed to editorial purity on the issue of both UI and paid inclusion. MSFT, on the other had, has been the black hat, treating its search results and its search users with near contempt, clutttering up the UI with commercial come ons and littering its organic results with Looksmart directory listings and Inktomi paid inclusion.

Now all that is gone, and MSFT can claim the high ground. The implications are twofold: First, Google has lost some of their unique competitive positioning. And second, Yahoo, which arguably might be called the gray hat, has lost a whipping boy. While I and others (notably Danny Sullivan) have argued that Yahoo's CAP program is intellectually defensible, it seems to me this move by MSFT will force Yahoo to further clarify its approach to paid inclusion.

Besides dropping paid inclusion, MSFT has redesigned search, refined its Toolbar, and introduced a "Technology Preview Site" where an early beta of its crawler results can be tested.

FT story....

Update: I should have posted the tech preview site, sorry, it's here...

June 22, 2004

Document Compare on Google S1

IPOWashPost has a good roundup (reg req'd), the Times does as well. Of note: Larry and Sergey's letter has been moved from its top position, far more risk langauge has been added overall, Merrill Lynch has been dropped (speculation as to why runs from ML's inabilty to grok the tech required to run the auction to the lack of profit on the deal to ML possibly leaking info). Lastly, The Times has an interesting tidbit at the end about a recent Google bomb:

Separately, there was an indication yesterday that Google's vaunted corporate culture may be under stress as a result of competition and the stock offering. As of yesterday afternoon, typing the words "out of touch management" into Google caused the search engine to list as its first result a page describing the company's top management.

A person close to the company said that Google employees had engaged in the practice of "Google bombing." A Google bomb is an attempt by a group of people to cause a particular Web page to become the first result for a search phrase. The Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

What I find interesting is that this is not the case this morning. I have no idea if results change that quickly on their own (from yesterday afternoon to this morning). Anyone know?

June 21, 2004

Amazon Switches to A9 On Home Page...Still Google, In the End

a9-web-search-headerAs Owen points out on the 2.0 blog, Amazon switched to A9 today (I think it was today) on its homepage. Makes sense that they'd eat their own dog food...of course for now, the main ingredient in that food is Google SERPs...

UPDATE: A well placed source tells me that in fact this switch happened in early June and no one really noticed till now.

Google Files Amended S-1 (S-1A)

No time to grok this, but here's a pointer....also there's a S-1A I missed in May...

June 20, 2004

The Ask Package Deal

gotodiana.gifCBSMW alerts us to Ask's package deal - the trend of creating a editorial menagerie around certain well-worn search terms involving celebrities, current events, and the like. Some might say this is simply algorithmic dress up, but at the end of the day this is editorial, folks. The best decisions about what to show a consumer interested in Britney or Shrek will not come from an algorithm, it will ultimately come from editors. Sure, you can do a decent approximation up to a point with computers, but to really fine tune it, you need human decisions. If the format takes off, money will flow into and from this model, and it will become economical to in fact have more humans doing this. It's web search rebuilding human input, in a way.

FWIW, it is not surprising that the one company who does NOT dabble in this, at least not much, is Google (once could argue the integration of news and Froogle is a step in that direction). Editorial, in general, is not what Google does, but Yahoo has already begun the practice, MSFT probably will increase it soon, and Ask claims to own it. Excite was working on technology like this back in the day, but this is not new, in fact Bill Gross did the same thing with GoTo back in 1998, as the pic at left shows (I got this as part of my research on the book..click for full view.)

Google Extends Syndication, Adds Site Flavor

Late to this one, life got in the way, but worthy of note nonetheless. Google late last week introduced two new offerings, Google AdSense for Search, and Site-Flavored Google Search. One is a commercial product, the latter a Labs project. Both give new tools to publishers which, through their adoption, extend Google's reach into the web.

Full PR info is in extended entry.

labs_smNow, these are interesting products for a couple of reasons. From what I can tell, Site Flavored is the outgrowth of Google's Kaltix acquisition. It allows a webmaster to tailor Google's search results to a site's own tendencies (so my site, for example, would bring search engine results as opposed to headhunters...). It seems a pretty blunt instrument for now (not instantly updated, categories are pretty general) but that will change with time. Site Flavored is yet another way for Google to get you registered into a Google relationship - a key strategic imperative (in fact, once you add site flavored search to your site, the logo google_kaltix_site_flavored_searchboxthat Google places on your site links to Google's personalized search page). It's another neat feature that will help get Google's search results distributed across more of the web, and leverages the Google platform in a more robust manner.

Of course Google is already in the web platform biz - they serve AdSense to thousands of sites. Yup, true. And they are extending that with their other product, AdSense for Search. As far as I can tell (and I may get this wrong), this is a way of syndicating AdWords - their in house ad serving tech used on the main search site, and licensed to big partners like BellSouth and AOL - out to the masses. As Danny points out, this has been done before, but abandoned in the dot com bust.

I'll be very interested to see how much uptake these products get.

Peter Adams (CTO Looksmart) weighs in on Site Flavored.

Wired News on the news....


Google announced two new innovations today that enable web publishers to
enhance their websites by adding a Google search box which provides their
users access to billions of web pages through Google's advanced search
technology. These two separate programs also give web publishers a choice of
sharing in revenue generated from ad clicks or customizing their user's
search experience.

Google AdSense for Search

The first innovation enables web publishers to place a Google search box on
their websites and provide their users with Google search results and
keyword-targeted advertisements. Through this new online program, Google
shares the revenue generated from ad clicks with the web publisher.

Websites in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese,
Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish are eligible for the
program. Web publishers apply for the program through the online
application for Google AdSense available at www.google.com/adsense/.

This program is an extension of the combined Google WebSearchT and Google
AdSenseT for search programs, previously offered exclusively to larger
websites and portals such as AOL, Earthlink, and BellSouth. The search
results served through this program are hosted by Google and require no
additional resources from the publisher. These search results pages can
also be customized with logos specified by the publisher and color schemes
that complement the website. Web publishers can also track the number of
queries, clicks, clickthrough rate, and earnings through a web-based account
interface.

Site-Flavored Google Search

Google also announced the availability of site-flavored Google Search, a
Google Labs project that provides websites with a "flavored" search box that
delivers search results customized to reflect the content of the website.

With site-flavored Search, webmasters select from a wide variety of
categories to specify the interests that describe their website. For
instance, a computer site owner might select [computers > hardware] to
describe their site. A user searching for the word "mouse" from that site
will see results more relevant to the computer peripheral than the animal.

With this technology, webmasters and site publishers can enhance the overall
experience of their website(s) by connecting users with search results that
are relevant to the website they are visiting. The program is free and
available at http://labs.google.com.

June 18, 2004

Find.com Launches, Raises My Eyebrows

FIND_small3Look at this, a new search site "for business professionals." I'm not sure this will catch on, but it is a reflection of the trend toward vertical/domain specific search...Find.com.

So I head over there and do the typical vanity search - for "Searchblog." After all, it's business related content. And what do I see? Three of my postings are highlighted at the top as for sale by some company called "NetContent." Hmm. *My* postings, for sale on Find.com. No one asked me. Hmmm.

Well this is interesting. In fact, with a little poking around, I see blog entries by all sorts of folks are "for sale," as well as stuff by mainstream magazines like BusinessWeek. Note to NetContent: I'll be calling.

ClickZ story.

The older, wiser Business.com.

June 17, 2004

Om Sees BlinkX

blinkX.gif Om Malik, who has a very good blog on all things telecom/bband and works at B2.0, reviews a new software tool that combines aspects of both desktop and web search called BlinkX. He's over the moon about it, so watch this company...

Ripping off Google?

An astute reader points me to www.milfclan.com, which sounds a lot like a porn site, till you click on it, and get a perfect mirror of Google. For reasons neither he nor I can discern, it seems they are ripping off Google's HTML. Huh.

Update: Readers have pointed out that the site was or perhaps is still a torrent site. From a reader:

Tried to leave this as a comment, oddly enough, MT refused due to
'questionable content'. Maybe the URL was in an MT-Blacklist config?

Anyway, http://latest.milfclan.com is a popular Bitorrent resource for
the latest TV show downloads. They're probably using a DNS entry
pointing to Google as some kind of obfuscation tactic?

Due to the semi-legitimate nature of the site (I pay for my TV chanels,
so I don't see a problem downloading shows), please don't quote me
directly if you post about this.

June 15, 2004

Huh. Google Buys Into Baidu.

Innaresting.

Baidu is China's biggest independent Internet search engine and is one of Google's strongest rivals in China. Its music search tool is considered one of the country's best.

But it faces growing competition both from other Chinese search engines, such as Sohu.com, and from foreign giants like Google and Yahoo, which has an alliance with Beijing 3721 via a Hong Kong partner of the Chinese Internet service provider.

"From Google's perspective, it saw Yahoo acquiring 3721 and may have felt prompted to make a move," said Duncan Clark, managing director of the BDA China Ltd. consultancy in Beijing.

June 14, 2004

News: Yahoo Says: 2 Gigs to You, Google

mailma1.gif
Well, the ante's been upped in the user registration - er - mail wars. Yahoo will announce Tuesday that it has revamped its mail products, increasing the storage on its paid and free products to 2 gigabytes and 100 mbytes, respectively.

Is this a big deal? Yes. Why? Well, it's the first shot in a long war of attrition that will benefit consumers and pave the way toward a true platform web. It's very exciting, in a way, if you're into this kind of stuff.

Yahoo mail chief Brad Garlinghouse (OK, formally, vice president, Communications Products ) gave me a quick overview of the strategy shift and said that Yahoo Mail is "getting a new coat of paint" on the UI side, and that "basically, storage is now a commodity." He notes that this is consistent with Yahoo's "life engine" theme - that mail is now a main way many manage their life, and Yahoo wants to create a mail program that understands that mail is more than text - it's photos, calendar, etc.

The upgraded premium product will cost $19.99 a year and include 2 gigs of storage. This doubles Gmail's one gig limit, I am sure quite intentionally. Also, the premium product will lose graphical ads...

A full list of features is in the extended entry of this post, or I imagine by the time you all read this you can just search Google - er - Yahoo News for more. Well shit, I was told to embargo this till midnight, but the frigging world already has it...The Times story misses the search piece altogether...but does point to an issue Yahoo is testing in a trial ballon fashion - that of privacy.

The main thing I think is missing from this ante-upping play is full featured search - the release simply says "Faster search – Yahoo! Mail inboxes are easier than ever to manage, thanks to even better search capabilities at faster speeds." That sounds like a whole lotta nothing, compared to what Gmail does. I'll ask for more details and post on it here when I hear.

Yahoo! Announces “New and Improved” Yahoo! Mail,
Introduces Major Increase in Storage Space,
Makes 50 Million Additional E-Mail Addresses Available

Yahoo! Mail Gets a New Look and Feel,
Continues Robust Security and Commitment to Privacy,
Filters More Than 95 Percent of Spam

Sunnyvale, CA – June 15, 2004 -- Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today unveiled a new and improved Yahoo! Mail (http://mail.yahoo.com), the No. 1 e-mail service in the country, measured both by reach1 and by the percentage of people who identify Yahoo! as their primary personal e-mail account2. Yahoo! is leveraging years of customer insight with key innovations to deliver a product that responds precisely to what consumers want and need in an e-mail service.

Yahoo! is introducing a number of exciting enhancements to Yahoo! Mail including a major increase in storage space for both free and premium users. Free e-mail subscribers will automatically be upgraded to 100-megabytes of storage, 25 times more than the prior free offering. Premium customers, including subscribers to SBC Yahoo! Dial and DSL, will have virtually unlimited storage at 2-gigabytes, far in excess of any major e-mail service and 200 times the amount offered by most other Internet service providers. All users will benefit from the new design and improved search capabilities, and graphical ads will be removed from Yahoo! Mail Plus and SBC Yahoo! Mail, all of which make Yahoo! Mail easier and faster than ever. Additionally, the company is opening up more than 50 million Yahoo! IDs, giving consumers more address options for their e-mail accounts.


The company is focused on continually innovating and improving Yahoo! Mail, and a number of additional product enhancements are expected to follow in the coming months.

“Our unique experience as an e-mail pioneer and innovator in the communications space – coupled with insights gleaned from our tens of millions of loyal customers – helps ensure we are delivering the best e-mail product possible,” said Brad Garlinghouse, vice president, Communications Products, Yahoo! Inc. “With the new Yahoo! Mail, consumers won’t have to think about mailbox size. When they judge webmail value, they’ll continue to look at all the things that make Yahoo! Mail No. 1 – including privacy practices, superior spam and virus protection, and integrated calendaring and alerts.”

Yahoo! Mail: No.1 and Now Better Than Ever

The overall goal of the improvements are to extend Yahoo!’s position as the market’s leading e-mail product – which means adding useful new features, while maintaining and even improving the experience for the company’s millions of loyal e-mail customers. Key elements of the new features being introduced today include:

§ Streamlined design – Although still comfortably familiar, the new look of Yahoo! Mail is easier than ever to use. Yahoo! has developed an even cleaner design that allows consumers to quickly and easily read and compose e-mail while eliminating graphical ads for premium users entirely.

§ Increased storage & message attachment size – Leveraging consumer insights around what users want and need, Yahoo! has introduced new storage levels. Yahoo! inboxes now allow message sizes up to10-megabytes, and 100-megabyte mailboxes for free users and virtually unlimited storage for premium customers with 2-gigabyte mailboxes. The new mail storage sizes follow last year’s changes to Yahoo! Photos, when the company began to offer unlimited free storage for photo files.

§ Faster search – Yahoo! Mail inboxes are easier than ever to manage, thanks to even better search capabilities at faster speeds.

§ More account names – Yahoo! is releasing more than 50 million Yahoo! IDs allowing consumers more freedom to pick the Yahoo! e-mail ID that best suits them. These Yahoo! IDs include a number of highly sought after names that have been dormant for many years and are just now being put back into circulation.

Safer, More Secure Inboxes

These enhancements supplement Yahoo!’s industry leading virus and spam protection. Protecting people’s inboxes has been a key priority – and as a result, Yahoo! Mail automatically scans e-mail attachments to help protect consumers from viruses and consistently filters more than 95 percent of spam3 thanks to SpamGuard, Yahoo!’s proprietary spam filtering system.

“We know that the longer a consumer has an email account, the more likely they are to be targets for unwanted e-mail, which is why we are constantly fine tuning our spam controls to tighten the noose around the necks of spammers,” continued Garlinghouse. “We don’t think consumers should or will accept an e-mail experience that degrades over time. Yahoo! Mail enjoys high regard among tens of millions of long-standing and loyal customers and we think that is thanks in part to our unending vigilance in protecting their inboxes.”


About Yahoo! Mail


Launched in October 1997, Yahoo! Mail (http://mail.yahoo.com) is one of the Web’s largest, most popular free e-mail providers. Yahoo! Mail helps people stay in touch at home, at work or while traveling for business or pleasure. Yahoo! Mail is fully integrated with Yahoo!’s many other popular services to make it easy to access all the Internet services people need. Yahoo! Mail has received a variety of prominent industry accolades including “Best Free E-Mail” for three years by PC World, and CNET Editors’ Choice awards.

About Yahoo!


Yahoo! Inc. is a leading provider of comprehensive online products and services to consumers and businesses worldwide. Yahoo! is the No. 1 Internet brand globally and the most trafficked Internet destination worldwide. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yahoo!’s global network includes 25 world properties and is available in 13 languages.

Contacts:
Helena Maus, Yahoo! Inc., 408-349-7085, helena@yahoo-inc.com
Jessie Anderson, Westhill Partners, 212-994-3831, janderson@westhillpartners.com

1 Nielsen//NetRatings, May 2004
2 IPSOS-Insight, Sept 2003
3 Internal Yahoo! data

June 10, 2004

Search as a Window

Scoble notes that eBay has in the past learned from listening to those who criticize eBay, then figuring out ways to include the naysayers and their insights into making eBay better. To put that to good end, Scoble is using tracking phrases across Feedster, PubSub, and T'rati to see who is saying "I hate (Scoble, Longhorn, or Microsoft.)"

In other words, he's using conversation search to get smarter and better. Good idea.

June 9, 2004

Go Bears, Search Looksmart

cal-title-fThey must have known I'm a Cal guy: Looksmart has done a deal with Berkeley for an "Affinity" search portal, along the lines of affinity credit cards, etc.You use their search engine, and a portion of the proceeds benefit Cal sports (they need the help!). Not a bad idea, but if anything says "commodity" it's this kind of deal. In any case, the details are here, and here's a summary from their PR folk:

Looksmart is pioneering “affinity search” with Cal, applying the same principles that business organizations such as the credit card company, MBNA, which has developed credit cards that will directly give back $$ to the specific group (such as the Sierra Club, etc.). By identifying groups of avid supporters (college alumni, fans, students, members of conservation organizations, etc) who will switch from Google or Yahoo to search on a site that produces revenue for the organization or a cause they're passionate about, the “affinity program” brings $$ back to the group. As an example, MBNA has been able to recruit 5,000 organizations and 12 million cardholders with this approach. This is the first program of its kind in the nation where a higher education institution has tried this sort of partnership.

Ask Adds Desktop Search: Tukaroo

askAlso files intent to sell as much as $400 million in stock. My my. It's getting interesting, eh?

Tukaroo does desktop search. The URL is blank right now (not the best way to manage your 15 minutes of fame, in my humble ....). The Google cache ain't doing much better.

Here's an old press release on them...

UPDATE: Of course Gary Price found more!
This from the Yahoo cache
and
this too...

June 8, 2004

Idea Dumb, Guys

titanicsm.jpg
In an earlier post I referred to this piece (on a keynote at a B2B trade show) and ranted a bit about trade magazines, the internet, and the like, but it seems the Ad Age story missed what I think is the key piece of blinkered thinking that came from the speech. Rafat points it out:

Trade Companies To Block Google and Other Search Engines?: It is an idea floated by International Data Group CEO Pat Kenealy, no less. He gave a speech recently at American Business Media conference, and also talked about Google's effect on trade media companies and magazine industry...
In the latest issue of Media Business magazine (it is available as a PDF and rather cumbersome to download, as the whole magazine in split into two PDFs...the Google story is broken in the middle), a story discusses the Google conundrum for magazine publishers...and quotes Kenealy on his speech at the ABM conference: "Kenealy has floated the idea that American Business Media member companies should agree to block Google and other search engines from crawling their sites. Together, these business media companies could develop their own search algorithm, or they might cut a more favorable revenue-sharing deal with an existing search engine, he said."

Rearrange the deck chairs, boys! Let's all get a good view of our asses as we sink to the bottom....Sure, you can put your site behind registration, I mean, many do, though they're learning that even pages behind registration should be visibile in some way to engines. But block search engines? How about next you go off the power grid and start churning butter by hand? And whoa boy, do I want to see the search algorithms these guys might come up with.

Cut a deal with search engines to get revenue for inclusion? Yeah, but it flows the other way in this market. B2B, meet CAP or AdWords. Get the engines to pay you for the honor of searching your content? Er...no. But you might start to think about getting into the domain specific game, where instead of circling wagons, you add value (something most B2B publishers have long ago forgotten about - how much do they really care about high quality editorial, past lip service?). Here's a place to start....

Meanwhile, note this: Startup TechTarget, which is based entirely on the internet, just got $70 million (that's Seven Oh) in venture. It's main competitor besides CNET? IDG. I wonder if it's interested in blocking search engines. I know from talking to Shelby at CNET that they certainly aren't, in fact, they're optimized for search - they want to be found, they think what they have is worth knowing about. Indeed.

Pay Per Call: Bypass the Web, Make the Call

phoneNYT Monday had this story on a "trend" in search - pay per call. Idea is that marketers will create a market in which calls become the performance metric. I can see it, but not devoid of a website and not without some troubling implications for organic search results. I do think the integration of search, voice and web is a big story, especially w/r/t mobile platforms. ...

June 7, 2004

Yahoo Arbitraging RSS Keywords Via Google?

I doubt it, but that's what Marketing Wonk suggests. In any case it's rich to see that Yahoo is buying AdWords on Google for the keyword "RSS". Maybe next Google will buy "Atom" on Overture...

Gates at D: MSFT Will Wear White Hat In Search

bill-gatesI'll be at the D conference for the next day or so. Reports will be sporadic, as there is no wireless net - I'm told Walt prefers his ballrooms blog and keyboard free.

In any case, Gates was the featured luminary after dinner tonight. Furthering previous announcements about cleaning up MSN's search practices and clearly biting his tongue (or sitting on his hands, take your pick), Bill Gates tonight parried Walt and Kara's spirited questions regarding MSFT's search strategies with a bit of guile, some well chosen words, and a dash of humor, in particular as it related to Google ("Oh, there's nothing they can't do!" he joked in a mock fawning voice), a company he recently acknowledged had kicked Microsoft's collective butt when it comes to search.

Tonight he was not as charitable - at one point saying MSFT's goal was to be the best in search. He jokingly advised the crowd to buy Google stock and coyly refused comment as to whether he thought Google's advantage lay mostly in marketing. He did note that the Google and MSFT culture were pretty similar (is he reading my blog!?). Some tantalizing hints came as Walt asked him about paid inclusion and the like. He repeated that Microsoft will clean up its search practices, but he seemed to hint things would go a bit further than that.

"They have a way of formatting things that has had some appeal," Gates said. "It will be matched."

"Web search is a incredible business," he continued. "(But) If you want to find things that are local...it's terrible today. If you want to find things that are of particular interest to you, it is quite terrible today."

Gates blamed search's shortcomings on its keyword-based approach, and argued that natural language and contextual semantic approaches will be the next leap forward.

Gates also reviewed the Longhorn strategy, at one point saying that the oft-delayed OS would be the most significant shift in Microsoft's computing environment since the jump from DOS to Windows (the core shift being in data structures - the file system - Gates long-standing dream of having a more robust file system, which of course is a truly searchable and transportable file system.) He also mentioned that RSS and blogging was an area of particular interest within Microsoft.

UPDATE: Walt emailed me to take issue, in a nice way, with my statement about his view of blogging. He doesn't want a blog or keyboard free ballroom, he reminds me, he wants a Wifi free ballroom, as he wants his audience to focus on the program as opposed to surfing the web or checking email. And he's all for blogging, just not during the sessions.