Author: John Battelle

Type “miserable failure” into Google. Out pops Google’s top pick: George W. Bush. This comes to me via Farber’s IP list, but many others have crossed my desk over the past year, including one on “weapons of mass destruction” which – if you hit “I’m Feeling Lucky” – still gaves a 404: Not Found-like error thanks to the vagaries of web humor, linking, and PageRank.

UPDATE: This was a case of Googlebombing, see here….

Today I bounced around a bit, from a very stimulating two hours with Louis Monier, founder of Alta Vista and current head of R&D/Search at eBay, to attending a CMO roundtable discussion at Yahoo where co-founder David Filo spoke, to a Churchill Club dinner in SF where Walt, Kara, Greg Harper and Larry Page talked about their favorite gadgets.
I asked Louis to react to the ideas in my monoculture post – that the best minds are now silo’d in private corporations. He had a great response: “Airlines are not built by the academy.” In other words, very complex and expensive stuff by definition is done by the private sector. Monier was, in fact, a veritable quote machine, and were it not so late, and were I not so tired, I’d create a whole post on the subject. Perhaps tomorrow. One more: “Google is, I think, the intellectual descendant of Alta Vista….I always said, with search you need a sharp pencil, that’s all.” In other words, don’t give me more than I need, just focus just on solving the search problem. It is true, Alta Vista was briefly THE search engine that mattered – about 1996-97, before it was ruined by Compaq and later CMGI.
The CMO discussion focused on Yahoo’s brand. It featured a panel of senior Yahoo execs talking about what makes the brand special, with an emphasis on how they live the brand from the inside out – how the company and its employees act in a way consistent with what the brand means to the outside world. A bit flat, but there was some neat stuff – I always like to hear Libby Sartain speak (she’s the head of HR there) – she’s infectious and quite inspiring. David told the early founding story, which was good to hear from the founder’s perspective.
The Churchill Club was livelier. There’s nothing like geeks with toys to get a crowd going, and Larry for one outdid himself. He really does love this toys, and seemed quite in his element – relieved, I imagine, to for once be in a public speaking role where he does not have to directly bear the weight of being a founder of Google. Cool stuff included a blue tooth ear plug for cell phones, LED flashlights (no bulbs, quite bright, long battery life), a 4 million pixel webcam that is its own POP server and looks rather like HAL from 2001, and touchless, digital toilets from Japan that require no toilet paper (they wash and dry you at the touch of a button. Really.)

So I am offline today (down in the valley meeting Louis Monier and various folks at Yahoo) and I checked into a local Starbucks, and hey, I’m the feed of the day on Feedster! Welcome all of you who might stop by thanks to the pointer. For a tour of what the site’s all about, check out this post on the book and for more on me, see this as well.

Thanks Scott!

I’ve been thinking lately about the role of blogs and RSS in search, and that, of course, has led me to both the Semantic Web and to Technorati, Feedster, and many others. Along those lines, I recently finished a column for 2.0 on blogs and business information. I can’t reveal my conclusions yet (my Editor’d kill me) but suffice to say, I find the intersection of blogging, search, and the business information market to be pretty darn interesting.
I’m certainly not alone. Moreover has created “Enterprise-Grade Weblog Search” – essentially, a zietgiest mining tool for corporations. One can imagine similar products from any of the RSS search engines, or even from the major marketing agencies of the world. On the other end of the spectrum (making blogs easier to read for consumers, as opposed to easier to mine for product marketers), Meg Hourihan is fast at work on Kinja, which is going to be a blog of blogs that will make finding and following blogs easier. Bloglines is doing similar work.
What makes this interesting from the perspective of search is the structured nature of what is being searched – blog postings and news articles, for the most part (or maybe I should say the data is “vaguely structured” – a term in a paper I just read – more on that later). Anyway, I sense a pretty potent market shaping up. Anyone know of other folks, companies, or news I should know about?

For those of you who don’t follow the vagaries of search engine index updates, the past few weeks may have been pretty uneventful. But for the businesses and marketers who make their living by ranking well in Google’s listings, it’s been a pretty tumultuous month. That’s because once again the Google Dance has swept through the search engine markets, and this last one was unique.

“Google Dance” refers to the process by which Google updates its index – the master code that determines which listings you see as a result of your queries. Because it is a massive index, and because Google often wants or needs to incorporate various tweaks and refinements to its site-ranking secret sauce (in particular to fight spam), it can take days or even weeks for a new index to settle across the web. The folks over at WebmasterWorld track this stuff quite closely, and have taken to naming each update alphabetically, following the nomenclature usually reserved for hurricanes. This past one happens to be F, and has been dubbed (dub-ya’d?) Florida.

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A very kind reader (I’ll buy the drinks next time) has forwarded me eBay’s recent analyst day presentation (from earlier in the month). This reader’s comment: “The focus on search was VERY new…analysts were trying to figure out the significance.” Indeed, one of the slides declares: “eBay is Search!”

A couple of things come to mind when reviewing the slides (there were more than 300,covering the entire business, both US and int’l). First, eBay knows that the faster and more relevant they can make their internal search, the better their margins. They understand that they have a marketplace of people with very specific intents, looking for very specific things. The easier eBay can make it for folks to find what they want (whether it’s a bid, an item, or a comparison), the better their bottom line looks. Toward this end, eBay has built its own internal search engine called Voyager, which is optimized for eBay users. One of the slides in the analyst presentation boasts: “We are world class at analyzing our user base.”

Second and possibly more important is the role of search in customer acquisition. eBay has a world class IT solution in place to monitor tens of thousands of paid keywords across the web, each with its own P&L and analytics. I can’t confirm this, but I would not be surprised if eBay is Google’s largest customer, something that probably makes both companies uncomfortable, because each can analyze the other’s data and mine it for competitive edge. In the presentation eBay also notes the power of natural or algorithmic search (the “pure” results) – the company says it is revamping its entire site to optimize for natural search. Now that’s quite a statement. Again, major thanks to my source for this information.

Among the analysts still covering the internet after the great wipe out of 2001, Safa Rashtchy, of Piper Jaffray, has received the most notice as an early and ardent supporter of search. His company will soon come out with a new report forecasting online advertising revenues (Safa is credited with pegging the paid search segment of the market at a widely reported figure of nearly $7 billion by 2007). In his recent newsletter, which summarizes a conference Piper hosted on online advertising, Safa predicts revenues will sharply accelerate, to more than $15 billion by 2008. Also, he predicts that online ad revenues will match 2000’s number of $8.1 billion – the height of the boom – by next year. My guess: he’s wrong – when the counting’s done, 2004 will beat 2000 by a comfortable margin.

I’m offline most of today, but enough folks have passed me these two sites as interesting cultural outgrowths of search that I’ll post them here for your review. The first, GoogleRace, plugs into the Google API and ranks each candidate by keyword searches. Some of the tops searches are “large penis” and “George Bush is going to lose”. (Thanks Kenny..)

Googlehouse, on the other hand, is more understated. This is an attempt to make a cultural commentary through images – the site polls the Google Image search database and pulls up images that fit various parts of an imaginary house. Click around a bit, if you’ve got the time. This kind of stuff usually pushes my MEGO button, but…give it a looksee. (Thanks Tim…)

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