A fun “blind taste test” between Yahoo, MSN, and Google is here. Really interesting.
Google is starting to poke around the pay per call market, and the company has also begun accepting local merchant info into its Froogle application. Whether local merchants will list is an open question, for more read the wine anecdote.
Google also announced a $3 million gift to the LoC for its digital library project. The Print/Book Search issue is really not going away, by the way, and remains a seminal debate. More to come on that, interesting to note folks changing sides on the issue…
Ask and GoFish announce multimedia search deal.
Via Silicon Beat, Pandora, a music search site, takes in $12 million. This feels like a hell of a lot. Also from SB, Dipsie, which has been very quiet for a year, has launched with a different, deep web model.
Dick Costolo is thinking hard about how to make RSS better. Read this post. (And this one from Fred).
Watch this site: Xooglers, the blog of Google’s former Director of Consumer Marketing Doug Edwards (he left after five years, he acknowledges that “my life is good”). The posts are fascinating. From one of them:
It’s a long story, but one I now have lots of time to tell. This blog is partly about that, but mostly about what happened during the following five years and three months, while I served as Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management for Google.
For the last eight months, I’ve been gathering my thoughts in preparation for writing a book. That may still be forthcoming, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that a book would not be the Google way to do this.
And another:
Your S.A.T. score was the measure of your intellectual capability; your GPA represented the numerical summary of your ability to execute on that potential. Your value to Google could be plotted using those two data points.
Sergey’s desire to reduce every decision to an equation would cause me a fair amount of frustration in the years to come. While it forced a discipline on me that was likely lacking in my career up to that point, it also went against my deeply-held conviction that some things are not expressible simply by deriving the correct algorithm.
Pandora isn’t bad, but a lot of folks I’m in contact with seem to be talking about last.fm which runs a similar but more flexible service.
Last.fm is not bad, but the concept is very different. Last.fm gives you recommendations based on statistic analysis of what your musical ‘neighbors’ listen to, whereas Pandora recommends based on the actual musical qualities of the stuff you like. I find that Pandora gives much better recommendations, but YMMV.
In rounding up holiday thoughts, I think it’s worth looking again at the incredible stupidity of those suing Google.
I’m not renewing my membership in the Author’s Guild because of their remarkable lack of vision. You can see more about why at: Publisaurus Rex Versus Google
The concept of CREATIVITY is not often expressed by equations, SATs, GPAs etc.
Probably so many good ideas or people never got a chance intial focus. 🙁
Being versatile is an important element in any growing companies’ success.- because the Human Race is versatile!
There probably is a Creative side to SERGEY
http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/www-db.stanford.edu/~sergey/photos/drag96.jpg
Couldn’t something like Google base force open the listings? Some will open their inventory information for competetive advantage while others will close it for the same reason. Couldn’t the edge users populate the closed system data into Google base?
I blogged about that search engine experiment on the 23d (http://hyperculture.typepad.com/sarah/2005/11/the_search_engi.html).
I cannot believe that I picked Yahoo! each time I tried it when I am such a Google girl!
It really was a cool experiement though.