Month: June 2005

# Yahoo! generally does a better job at indexing the blogosphere than Google does. We know they have been working hard to improve their index and here’s proof that they are getting results

# Even if Google is the one with the motto about not doing evil, Yahoo! seems to be the one interested in giving equal opportunity to the little guy: smaller blogs seem to have a better chance of being recognized by Yahoo! than they do of being recognized by Google

# While the front page of Google advertises they are currently indexing over 8 billion pages, it is very difficult to find ways to support that claim via the link feature they are offering: this can be seen as confirmation that Google does not tell you about all the links it has in its index.

Danny gives his analysis here.

Update: I have confirmed this move with Louis, he starts next week. I hope to have more soon.

One of the powerful aspects of owning a top photo sharing site is the possibility to own image search in the future. Microsoft, Google, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! all have extremely mediocre image search.

Search for a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge on Google image search and see what you get — super mediocre images of a great photographic subject. By owning an online photo sharing site Microsoft could use user online ranking data to prioritize image search and make MSN image search the clear leader. Although image search is a much smaller subset than text search it would be a powerful toehold in the Google dominated world.

“I do believe that Google will hit a wall eventually, and it will hit it spectacularly,” said the book author Moore. “The real question is: What will it do then?”

• We had noted earlier this year that we believe Google is likely to introduce both a listings product (similar to “Craigslist” but much more powerful) and a C2C/B2C transaction and payment platform. If Google Wallet indeed launches this year, it will be initially aimed as an additional service to over 200,000 Google merchants, many of whom also use eBay.

• Google will of course be facing significant hurdles to compete with the well-established PayPal, which has more than 72M users. However, we note that when Google entered the paid listing business, it also had to catch up with a much more established Overture, which it eventually replaced as the number one provider of paid search listings.