Category: Joints After Midnight & Rants

According to Beal, Yahoo’s new CAP (paid inclusion) program is not going over that well at the SES show. I can’t imagine it would – after all, Yahoo is asking folks to pay where before they didn’t feel they had to. The boards are negative on the move, though at least Yahoo is out there explaining itself (and Jeremy adds his two cents here). This might all blow over as the market adjusts to the realities of capitalism, but…

…before Yahoo made this move, I suspect that many marketers could get by on organic Google crawls and targeted AdWords/Overture buys. Now, because Yahoo is in a duopoly position, the stakes are raised, and marketers feel like they *have* to be part of the Yahoo club. They fear, I am sure, that if they do not pay, somehow they will be treated as second class citizens by Yahoo’s Slurp! crawler. Yahoo insists that its organic crawler is going to be “aggressive” and that paid inclusion is an add on of sorts, it insures that your site is crawled thoroughly and in the manner you choose (in particular, you can specify dynamic content, get fresher crawls, get reports, etc.).

But the company seems a bit tone deaf to the more primal forces at work here. First, the timing. Yahoo got a lot of mojo for the new engine it rolled out recently. Why taint that credibility so quickly with this announcement? The company could have waited a month or so, prepared the market for this in stages (for example, it might have cultivated an influencer network prior to the announcement, as I point out in my current 2.0 column). Secondly, it’s predictable that marketers would feel like they have no choice, that they are being forced to enlist in CAP. That is not good for a company’s reputation long term. If I were Yahoo, I’d monitor this closely, and adjust a bit if need be. Perhaps soothing words and assurances will be enough while the market swallows this new dose of medicine. But Google can and will make a PR killing portraying Yahoo as the Big Evil Biased Bully. Ask Jeeves already has: yesterday it cancelled its paid inclusion program …. I am sure the timing was pure coincidence.

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A soft-shouldered editorial in the NYT today from Verlyn Klinkenborg, an author who is also on the editorial board of the New York Times, and writes the occasional “editorial observer” column for the paper. As I was recently reminded by a good friend, it’s wise to step back and remember who the audience is for these kinds of things, as opposed to jumping all over the Times every chance that comes up. So, having done that, I still don’t quite get what this editorial adds…in the end, it says that Google is really important and that it won’t go away, and summarizes all the things Times readers already know about the company. He concludes that the Internet is, contrary to what he thought some years ago, quite useful, in large part thanks to Google. Well, welcome to the party, Verlyn. Glad you’re aboard.

As predicted, the big boys have turned their attention to the Yahoo-Google story. The NYT has a piece today (I’m quoted, I’m quite sure it’s one of the few times “full-tilt boogie” has made it into a business story) giving an overview of the Yahoo side, and Wired, in a cover package, pretty much runs what’s left of the Google story into the ground.

Now, I’m not going to spend *too* much time on this, but I did give the Wired package, which runs 15 pages – an eternity for most magazines – a hard read over the weekend. It fails on all kinds of levels. (When they post it, the package will be here.) And yet, it succeeded on the meta level, which is to say: Google *is* a huge story in the Wired space, and should be treated as such.

(more in extended entry below)

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Search for Wi Fi in Google Location, with a zip, and find your hotspots…

The Washington Post prints something of a Sunday rumination on how search engines might evolve, a rather flippant piece of magazine writing that reads like a poorly edited Wired rant from the early days (I should know). Overall the piece bothers me – it takes search seriously in word, but the tone finds a way to be dismissive at the same time, and only gives a cursory answer to the question it sets up (what might search look like in the future). The set up illustrates what I mean:

Only now in the bright light of the Google Era do we see how dim and gloomy was our pregooglian world. In the distant future, historians will have a common term for the period prior to the appearance of Google: the Dark Ages.

Well, in fact, I’ll warrant that when historians look back at this era, they’ll disagree. But enough about that. The piece does provide an interesting signpost of popular culture: our most respected institutions of journalism are trying to make sense of this phenomenon as more than just a business story. Thank God.

The last entry on Yahoo’s new search got me thinking about search results, and in particular Google’s, which nearly everyone imitates in one form or another. We all know about the endless list of results, 10 to a page, stretching past what Tim Bray calls “the Google event horizon.” I used to think that horizon was 100 or so entries – no one will ever look further than that. But the truth is, it’s usually one page of listings, if not less.

I’ve gotten to thinking – what’s the use of having all those results? I mean, really, from a user interface point of view, the only information we gain from “Results 1 – 10 of about 3,950,000” is the rather attenuated sense that the search engine is, in fact, pretty darn thorough. That used to be a big deal, back when engines were really crappy. But these days we expect engines to be thorough. What’s the point of giving me a list of more than 3 million results when I am never, ever, ever going to go through them?

Seems to me it’s time to change the interface. Clearly many others have thought about this, from Grokker to Mooter to Vivisimo and beyond. But it’s the big guys, Google and Yahoo, that make the standards, and I think we’re getting close to the point where a new user interface paradigm is needed for search. Danny talks about invisible tabs, and that’s a good idea. But I’m not talking about intuiting what the user wants – that’s the hard stuff, and I know there are plenty of PhDs working on that. I’m talking about something much less difficult – changing the way results we get are presented.

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Over at Joho, David Weinberger gives us a tantalizing glimpse of his full length essay in Esther’s Release 1.0:
The Semantic Earth

Every business in the world is headquartered on earth. Every employee works somewhere. Every customer is at some location at every moment. Every product is delivered to some spot and every service is performed at some coordinates. Every transaction involves at least one place and usually more than one. And yet, until recently, businesses have systematically managed location information only for processes directly concerned with moving people and goods. Why has the literal common ground of business been largely absent from business applications?……

Today was a meet-with-interesting-folks day, starting with Louis Borders and Doug Herrington, Chair and CEO, in that order, of KeepMedia. Doug and Louis last worked together on WebVan, which I loved as a service. “We overexpanded,” Doug confessed. I can relate.

KeepMedia has some grand visions of where it might be headed (think learning and communities), but it’s quite busy focusing on its current model, which is providing what I’ll call a “clean and well lit space for magazine search.” OK, so I see most things through the search lens, but really, when you think about it, folks who use the KeepMedia service are looking for content that matches their particular interests, and the KeepMedia service has some interesting search and personal filtering technologies to meet that intent.
(more via link below)

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