Category: Joints After Midnight & Rants

Ask has sense of humor too….

(thanks Gary…)

If Google published its S-1 in book form, it’d be #1 on Amazon for weeks. But you can read it for free here, because today, Google filed for the IPO of the decade. The details:

– Big News: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and VCs Sequoia and KPCB together own 95% of the company. The remaining 5% is split between early angels and a lava lamp wholesaler who “management admits got a pretty good barter deal back in 1998.”

– The employee stock option plan, long believed to be the impetus to a public filing, has been dumped in favor of a private shadow equity plan modeled after the Economist magazine. “It’s the only magazine we read that hasn’t put us on the cover,” Page explained. “We kind of hoped this hat tip might change that.”

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This time, it’s his employer’s travel service (that’d be Yahoo) that gets the honors…who hasn’t had this experience online?

OK, now I really have taken a shine to Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein. I always liked him, what with his oft-repeated quip that search engines ought to be like the computer on Star Trek, but in a SES speech this morning, apparently in a bid to outdo himself, he conjured up the idea of “search pets.” Damn, I wish I had stayed for this! From WebProNews, Silverstein speaks of a future some hundreds of years from now in which:

These search pets would not necessarily be like a pet dog, but more like “a genetically engineered beast.”

Adding to the science fiction, he believes search pets will be able to understand emotions and allow people to search for things that aren’t necessarily facts. For example, searchers can ask search pets, “What did Bob mean when he said that?”

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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.