John Battelle's Search Blog April 2004

Google Innovates for Advertisers

Obscured a bit in the A9 vortex is this announcement that Google is providing a much more granular tool for local advertisers interested in limiting their AdWord buys to specific locales or cities. I find this interesting as it points to Google’s willingness to be responsive not only to users, but to advertisers as well. Of course, offering users more relevant, localized ads can also be considered a service…. MediaPost, CNET, and the NYT report. I’m quoted in the NYT piece, seemingly beating on Google, but it’s not quite in context – I was saying that Google Local (not the local ad product) is still beta, and that Yahoo has been more aggressive in commercial search than Google to date.

Apparently Google’s move to aid local advertisers will really help merchants in Europe, who previously could only target at the country level. Now they can literally target by distance – say within 20 miles of a place of business. This kind of lat/longitude-driven metadata will open up a $12 billion local advertising market (US alone). And it soon will be integrated into the aforementioned Google Local, which was rolled out (as a beta) last month.

Good Morning, Your New Net IPO For The Day Is…

Alibris. Here are their S1 and other SEC docs. Alibris is a sort of high-end Amazon with the spin of hard-to-find and used titles….they filed their original registration statement more than a month ago…it's an WRHambrecht Open IPO deal…….

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Interview with A9’s Manber up on B2.0

No need to repost it here, as my interview with Udi is up on Business2.com without subscription walls (thanks 2.0!). Includes an intro which gives an overview of the service and the implications. Good for those of you who don't want to wade through my last two posts on the…

No need to repost it here, as my interview with Udi is up on Business2.com without subscription walls (thanks 2.0!). Includes an intro which gives an overview of the service and the implications. Good for those of you who don’t want to wade through my last two posts on the subject…and gives a bit of insight into how Udi’s mind works.

UPDATE: The link apparently is now behind reg, so the column is posted in extended entry. (6/21/04)

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Searching Is Getting More Complicated

A few weeks ago I spent the morning with Gary Flake, who heads up Yahoo's R&D efforts (Yahoo Labs). He's got some pretty cool stuff in the works over there, though most of it is still in the "I could tell you but then my publisher would kill me" category….

A few weeks ago I spent the morning with Gary Flake, who heads up Yahoo’s R&D efforts (Yahoo Labs). He’s got some pretty cool stuff in the works over there, though most of it is still in the “I could tell you but then my publisher would kill me” category. One thing he did say which stuck with me had to do with search interface issues – how to solve that intractable problem of figuring out what the user wants, without forcing that user to jump through UI hoops all day. “We just need one more datapoint,” Flake said, referring to the original query as the first datapoint. “Just one more interface element to make search better.” The problem, of course, is depending on a million factors, that second input might be any number of things, from a “Did you mean…?” clustering question to flicking on a personalization tool that filters results through your zip code, Amazon purchase patterns, search history, social network…etc.

Anyway, this all came up when I saw this eMarketer report today, proving at least the trends are heading – a bit – toward complication. It shows, as has been the case for the past year or so, that searches are getting more complicated – the percentage of searches that have just one word in them is declining, and the percentage of multi-word searches is ever-so-slowly increasing. The graf at the bottom of this post is last year, at the top, this year.

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More on A9

The blogosphere continues to chew away on A9, and I think it will take some time for the new service to fully reveal its more interesting features. Gary, for example, gives it a less-than-rave response here, and summarizes many of its features in the process. I wrote about the implications…

I wrote about the implications of A9 w/r/t business models in my last post, but I wanted to say a short bit about why I’m so interested in its approach.

To me, the core feature that makes A9 interesting is what Udi Manber calls a “history server” – the technologies behind A9’s search history and personalization features. Having your entire search and click history, and if you use the Toolbar, your entire browsing history as well, available on a server side application opens up all sorts of new approaches to solving search, research, and recall problems. Combining that history with what Amazon already knows about you (no, A9 does not do that…yet) creates even more powerful possibilities. Yes, it brings up massive privacy issues, but then, we’ve seen this movie a few times. Those who don’t want to watch can opt out.

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NEWS: A9, Amazon’s Search Portal, Goes Live: Reverberations Felt in Valley

A9, Amazon's much discussed skunk works search project goes live today, so I can finally write about it. I saw it last month (caveat: unbeknownst to me until recently, Amazon targeted me as their conduit to break this news – I think they wanted it to move from the blogosphere…

A9, Amazon’s much discussed skunk works search project goes live today, so I can finally write about it. I saw it last month (caveat: unbeknownst to me until recently, Amazon targeted me as their conduit to break this news – I think they wanted it to move from the blogosphere out, as opposed the WSJ in) and had to keep the damn thing to myself, it was hard, and here’s why: On first blush it’s a very, very good service, and an intriguing move by Amazon. It raises a clear question: How will Google – and more broadly, the entire search-driven world – react?

My gut tells me the public face will be one of partnership: After all, A9 uses Google’ search results and displays at least two paid AdWord listings per result (I’ve requested comment from Google, you can imagine I’m not the only one…). But I have to wonder: What business is Google in, after all? Is it still in the business of just search – as it was back when it was cutting search provisioning deals right and left, with Yahoo (already ended), AOL (arguable imperiled due to Gmail and other trends), Ask, and Amazon? Is it really still in the business of being an OEM to others, a strategy which allowed it to steal those portals’ customers? Or…has it evolved, to a business where it owns a large customer base, one it must now position itself to defend?

It seems to me, Google’s position in Amazon’s A9 implementation is at best a step backwards. If A9 is as good as it seems to be, every customer that uses and/or switches to A9 becomes an A9 search customer, and, more likely than not, a deeper and far more loyal Amazon customer. (The service incorporates a personal search history and many other really neat tweaks, including a wicked good Toolbar.) In essence, Amazon seems to be making a play for Google’s customers. Or it seems that way to me, anyway. Sure, Amazon isn’t in the AdWords business. It’s happy to outsource that to Google and focus on the entire US retail GDP instead…

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The Web Time Axis

One of my largest gripes about the web is that it has no memory. But I think this will soon change – at some point in the not too distant future we'll have live and continuous historical copies of the web that will be searchable – creating, if you will,…

One of my largest gripes about the web is that it has no memory. But I think this will soon change – at some point in the not too distant future we’ll have live and continuous historical copies of the web that will be searchable – creating, if you will, a time axis for the web, a real-time Wayback Machine (only there’ll be no broken links). In other words, in our lifetimes we’ll see our cultural digital memory – as we understand it through the web and engines like Google – become contiguous, available, always there. And barring a revival of the Luddites or total nuclear war, this chain will most likely be unbroken, forever, into the future. Historians looking back to this era will mark it as a watershed. At some definable point in the early 21st century, the web will gain a memory of itself, one that will never be lost again. Most likely, this will start as a feature of a massively scaled company like Yahoo or Google, much like Gmail or search itself is now. But it’s coming, and the implications are rather expansive.

If the web had a time axis, you could search constrained by webdate. You could ask questions like “show me all results for my query from this time period…” or “Tell me what was the most popular results for XYZ during the 3rd of May in 20XX.” How about “show me every reference to my great grandfather, born in 2050,” asked by a great grandson in 2150? Impossible? Yeah, seems that way, but…so did a free gig of mail and the concept of the entire Internet in RAM. Thanks to the dramatic decrease in the cost of storage, 64-bit computing, abundant memory (jesus, there’s an entendre), and the scalable business model of paid search, I think this day is not far off. The web is just ten years old, for the most part, but think what it might be like when it’s 100 years old. That’s a lot of data to search.

I was reminded of this idea (I had written it down a while back while musing for the book) when Gary sent word that Daypop is archiving its Top 40 back to 2002. It’s fascinating to see what was the buzz, say, two years ago today.

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Gmail update: CA Legislation, Timeline, et al

Hard to keep up with all the Gmail news, CNet rounds it up here. Upshot: CA legislator is threatening to introduce legislation outlawing the product, Google announced it was in a 3-6 month test phase and might make changes to the product based on response (opening the door to possible…

Month: April 2004

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Google Innovates for Advertisers

Good Morning, Your New Net IPO For The Day Is…

Interview with A9’s Manber up on B2.0

Searching Is Getting More Complicated

More on A9

NEWS: A9, Amazon’s Search Portal, Goes Live: Reverberations Felt in Valley

The Web Time Axis

Gmail update: CA Legislation, Timeline, et al

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