Month: June 2004

Emerging 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.

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As 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.

CBSMW 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.)