Month: June 2004

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,…

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….

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Find.com Launches, Raises My Eyebrows

Look 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…

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.

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Om Sees BlinkX

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……

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…

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A Morning With Danny Hillis

Have had a very productive couple of days recently on the book, talking at length with various folks who in one way or another have very unique views on the search world. Before I get to Tim Koogle, who I spoke to this morning, or Shana Fisher and Geoff Yang…

hillisHave had a very productive couple of days recently on the book, talking at length with various folks who in one way or another have very unique views on the search world. Before I get to Tim Koogle, who I spoke to this morning, or Shana Fisher and Geoff Yang (yesterday afternoon), I wanted to talk about my visit with Danny Hillis.

On Tuesday I flew down to LA to visit with Danny, who founded Thinking Machines. After that he became an imagineer at Disney for five or so years (“The best ‘real job’ you can have,” he quipped). Danny has a million great ideas and is something of a polymath. He recently founded Applied Minds as a way to put that skill to work (he partnered with Bran Ferren, himself a scary smart polymath).

Danny has a lot of things to say about search, it’s an area he finds rich in implications, in particular as it relates to some of the long-term projects he’s involved in, such as the Clock of the Long Now. We spent some time riffing on the future of search, and its current limitations, but … I get ahead of myself. What I really thought was incredible was the playground Danny and Bran have created for themselves at Applied Minds.

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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…

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?

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A New Boing Boing

I'm proud to say that Boing Boing has launched a new design, one that incorporates sponsors and a cleaner look. I was down visiting with Danny Hillis today (man, talk about mind blowing) and I was very happy to hear that he reads Boing Boing regularly. My role with…

bbhead10x.gif I’m proud to say that Boing Boing has launched a new design, one that incorporates sponsors and a cleaner look. I was down visiting with Danny Hillis today (man, talk about mind blowing) and I was very happy to hear that he reads Boing Boing regularly. My role with Boing Boing is the equivalent of “band manager” – I helped them round up the wonderful sponsors – Wired, Google (Blogger), and O’Reilly – and work out the details of how they can take the site to the next phase of it’s ongoing evolution (“brain candy for happy mutants since 1988!”). Take a look!

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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…

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.

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News: Yahoo Says: 2 Gigs to You, Google

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,…

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.

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A Year Of Predictions, Six Months In

That last post made me think about this one, in which I predicted, at the beginning of the year, what 2004 might bring. How am I doing, I wondered, six months in? Well, in the preamble, I thought I'd be done with my book by about now. That was…

nostraD-tm.jpg That last post made me think about this one, in which I predicted, at the beginning of the year, what 2004 might bring. How am I doing, I wondered, six months in?

Well, in the preamble, I thought I’d be done with my book by about now. That was pretty damn funny. Now I hope to be done by Fall, and with luck I just might.

My listed predictions were:

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A Year Ahead

Back when I was at Wired, I noticed that the NYT always seemed to run a "trend" story that pretty much repeated our own treatment, but about a year later. Now, I notice, the same is true in the case of B2.0. In the Times today, Jim Fallows (I am…

Back when I was at Wired, I noticed that the NYT always seemed to run a “trend” story that pretty much repeated our own treatment, but about a year later. Now, I notice, the same is true in the case of B2.0.

In the Times today, Jim Fallows (I am a big fan of his, he was a columnist for The Standard) points out that AdSense may be the next big thing in advertising models for the Web (not exactly news):

NYT piece

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