Month: March 2004

CNET reports that MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer got animated when the subject of search came up at the company’s recent advertising forum.

“People say that Microsoft does it all, but this is the case where we didn’t do it all,” Ballmer told an audience of marketing and media executives on Thursday, here at the software giant’s fifth annual advertising conference. Then, like an eager football coach pumping up the team for the second half, Ballmer reasserted that Microsoft is still in the game and plans to win.

“You’ll see a lot of good competition in the area,” he said emphatically, at one point throwing his pen.

Read More

How? Besides my own bias that all of ecommerce is driven by search, see this excerpt from a story on Shopping.com’s $400 million IPO:

Shopping.com’s biggest customer, responsible for 38% of its revenue, is Google. Shopping.com’s agreement with Google is expected to continue, although the market is highly competitive. The Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) e-commerce site has launched a new price comparison service, and Google is planning to launch its own price comparison service, Froogle.

And, ahem, let’s not forget Amazon…

Read More

Interviewed in ZDNet, Craig suggests that voice-activated search is not so far away. Recall that his model was, at one point, Star Trek. Google Labs has a rudimentary application based on this idea here. And, as I noted yesterday, Opera has integrated it already into a version of their browser (using IBM speech technology).

Silverstein said he believes that within a few years Google could have a voice interface for everything from driving directions to help you finding the aisle for a particular food in your local supermarket.

“That’s something you would never think to ask a search engine. You’re not likely to be using your laptop in a supermarket, but in the future I think search will be far more accessible — you won’t be tied to your desktop, you will be able to do it from your mobile phone or PDA — and you’ll start to see search used in fundamentally different ways. The kinds of things people want information about when they are walking around or sitting in a bar is very different to what they want while they’re at home,” he said.

Read More

Kanoodle announced that is has snagged MSNBC.com distribution today, here’s the press release. Earlier it announced “ClickFactor” – a new ranking system for its ContextTarget paid search system. Forgot what Kanoodle’s deal is? Here and here….