Yes, we're moving servers, getting ready for new things, and that means some stuff will be broken, acting oddly, grumpy…bear with us….
You could always search for stocks on Google, and some – like GOOG – would show a lame little icon and then click you through to Yahoo Finance or a few other sites in a rather kludgy tabbed interface. Now, you get a stock chart right at the top…
You could always search for stocks on Google, and some – like GOOG – would show a lame little icon and then click you through to Yahoo Finance or a few other sites in a rather kludgy tabbed interface. Now, you get a stock chart right at the top of the results page, and a bunch of information. In fact, you get so much, you might not really need to click through to Yahoo anymore (if you click on the chart, you still are taken to a framed view of Yahoo Finance). Innaresting. All to be useful to the user, of course. But still….see my musings on this in a past post here.A source from one of the second tier engines recently told me "There's simply no good traffic left anymore." We were discussing clickfraud, and he mentioned that many engines were beset by it because they did not have enough good traffic to pour over their paid listings. Instead, they…
I am not an expert in SEO or SEM, nor do I spend a lot of time thinking about traffic, in the abstract. But my own investigations of the affiliate business as well as recent acquisitions has got me thinking about traffic in more concrete terms.
In the world we now live, where search is king and the princes have been crowned, more or less – AOL, Yahoo, Google, MSFT, IAC – the scarcest resource is what that fellow called good traffic. I might rephrase that a bit, and call it “good intent” – as opposed to ill intent (clickfraud). Good intent is owned, in the main, by the crown princes of search, but as Safa points out, there are buckets of it – though smaller – at other sites, in particular shopping and high quality content sites.
Read MoreBlingo, the free-prize-inside search engine of which I wrote earlier, is officially launching today. The big news: Their search results are now powered by Google….
You got Indeed and Simply Hired for jobs. Topix for local news and information. Globalspec for engineering. Technorati and Feedster for feeds/blogs. And now…Oodle, for classifieds. I met with Oodle CEO Craig Donato while at PCForum last week, and I like the concept. He's not only crawling listings where…
You got Indeed and Simply Hired for jobs. Topix for local news and information. Globalspec for engineering. Technorati and Feedster for feeds/blogs. And now…Oodle, for classifieds. I met with Oodle CEO Craig Donato while at PCForum last week, and I like the concept. He’s not only crawling listings where you might expect it – local papers, national papers, craigslist – he’s also crawling eBay local and other unexpected sources.
But the main difference, Craig insists, is that Oodle is buyer focused, not seller focused. The site came from his own frustration with listings – the interface was terrible. How could he make it better?
The answer was not just crawling all those listings, but tagging them with all sorts of taxonomy-driven metadata to layer intelligent search over them all, so you could find what you wanted to find. A very neat idea if it works. Will it? Too early to tell, but test sites are up in Dallas, Philly, and Chicago.
Read MoreAfter I posted on Google buying Urchin, I got a call from the folks over at WebTrends. They felt a bit overlooked, after all, they just got bought too. Sure, I told them, I had noticed, but they were bought by a private equity fund, and that means one…
No no, the very nice PR person told me. They really want to make this business work, as it was not strategic to its original owner (NetIQ) anymore.
Awww, come on, I retorted. These guys want to make a buck, and that’s that.
Read MoreFun stuff. …Here let me be more concrete, if I've got a 1GB memory card in my mobile phone and most of that filled with messages and media, well there's no reason why that stuff can't be found by a web search, no? … …Now I go to the…
…Here let me be more concrete, if I’ve got a 1GB memory card in my mobile phone and most of that filled with messages and media, well there’s no reason why that stuff can’t be found by a web search, no? …
…Now I go to the Yahoo Search, and click on the “social” tab (it’d be right after the image search) and I’d type in something I’m looking for. Maybe it’d be tag names or maybe it’d be something more detailed. The search engine goes through its list of mobile items and presents the results. When the user clicks on a link he likes, well it’s not to get the item right away – it’s to request it. A message goes off to the mobile repository that says something like, “Hey, remember that item you said you had available? I’d like a copy of it. Now would be preferable, but if you want you can wait until the next time you have a chance. Thanks.”….
Read MoreRandy Farmer, head of the Yahoo! Community Projects team, blogs about Yahoo's new 360 social networking/blogging/etc product. From the Yahoo Search Blog: Now, I get to tell you about Yahoo! 360° — a new model for online sharing that's easy and convenient for everybody. During my years of online…
From the Yahoo Search Blog:
Now, I get to tell you about Yahoo! 360° — a new model for online sharing that’s easy and convenient for everybody.
Intelliseek launched BlogPulse 2.0 yesterday, adding more sites, more search, and more analysis. It only has six months of data though (before it only had two months). I wish we'd get working on that web time axis! On first glance (and that's all I've given it, caveat) there seem…
Intelliseek launched BlogPulse 2.0 yesterday, adding more sites, more search, and more analysis. It only has six months of data though (before it only had two months). I wish we’d get working on that web time axis! On first glance (and that’s all I’ve given it, caveat) there seem to be some powerful tools in this release, like the Trend Search.
Here’s the release.
Safa Rashtchy of Piper notes in a research report (click on the March 28 note) that the Ask/IAC deal could augur more Internet consolidation. After ASKJ, What Is Next? The announcement of Interactive Corp.'s intention to acquire ASKJ is likely to be a catalyst for the Internet and search…
Safa Rashtchy of Piper notes in a research report (click on the March 28 note) that the Ask/IAC deal could augur more Internet consolidation.
After ASKJ, What Is Next? The announcement of Interactive Corp.’s intention to acquire ASKJ is likely to be a catalyst for the Internet and search sector, especially given the recent misconception about weakness in search. As we have often stated, we believe a number of companies in our universe are perfect acquisition targets – perfect because they represent sectors that are on the rise, such as search, comparison shopping, lead generation, or content, and because their value can be significantly higher within a large company. We believe three key areas of value include content and search traffic, conversion technologies and comparison shopping platforms, and local search and listings platforms. Companies that are well represented in these areas include Marchex and Shopping.com, as our two favorites, as well as InfoSpace, CNET, and Homestore.
While we are not predicting the dawn of a new era of M&A activity within the Internet sector, we do believe that for the first time in many years there are distinct areas that are highly valuable for consolidation.
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