Category: Of Note in Search Biz

The Week That Was

Take a week off, a lot of things happen. Here's a round up of the news that was. Lots of folks arguing that Google's new version of its toolbar (covered here) is an unwarranted intrusion on the rights of site owners and/or users. Dan Gillmor covers it here, SEW…

Take a week off, a lot of things happen. Here’s a round up of the news that was.

Lots of folks arguing that Google’s new version of its toolbar (covered here) is an unwarranted intrusion on the rights of site owners and/or users. Dan Gillmor covers it here, SEW here. Myself, I think it’s just another feature, and if you don’t want it, don’t use it. I like the idea of control, and agree that ideally a toolbar user could toggle it on or off. But in the end, if it’s useful, it’ll take. If it isn’t, it won’t.

In lighter news, Lycos announced a dating search application. Can’t find a date? Use a search engine.

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Heilemann on Google

This is a great read. I didn't know it was out, but just found it. More after I've grokked it. John is a good friend and a great writer/reporter….

This is a great read. I didn’t know it was out, but just found it. More after I’ve grokked it. John is a good friend and a great writer/reporter.

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Vimeo: Flickr for Video

Via Searchviews: I'm going to guess that Flickr wants to be the Flickr for video, but for now, there's Vimeo……

Via Searchviews: I’m going to guess that Flickr wants to be the Flickr for video, but for now, there’s Vimeo…

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PeopleRank

Gary Price finds a new paper out of Stanford which proposes PeopleRank – a system for aiding annotation of pictures of people….

Gary Price finds a new paper out of Stanford which proposes PeopleRank – a system for aiding annotation of pictures of people.

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Google Hits Oregon Trail

Gary Stein notes that Google is buying up some land in Oregon for a technology center, and also notes that Yahoo is moving its media division to Santa Monica, a fact I knew, but neglected to mention here before….Yahoo's moves into media are starting to look very interesting, I…

Gary Stein notes that Google is buying up some land in Oregon for a technology center, and also notes that Yahoo is moving its media division to Santa Monica, a fact I knew, but neglected to mention here before….Yahoo’s moves into media are starting to look very interesting, I hope to speak to Lloyd Braun shortly about it all.

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Yellow Pages, Yahoo Local, and Channel Conflict

As I mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to dine with Lincoln Milstein and Peter Negulescu last night. Peter, or Petey as I like to call him, is an old friend who started with IBM and ran through all sorts of interesting companies, including Excite, before landing at the…

LocaldecksAs I mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to dine with Lincoln Milstein and Peter Negulescu last night. Peter, or Petey as I like to call him, is an old friend who started with IBM and ran through all sorts of interesting companies, including Excite, before landing at the helm of SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle’s digital arm), which got him just in the nick of time, to my mind. Lincoln was the number two guy at the New York Times Digital before jumping over to Hearst earlier this year.

The conversation wandered happily all over the place, but an interesting tangent focused on local search and its impact on the Yellow Pages. Given that Hearst runs a bunch of newspapers, including the Chronicle, and that the Chronicle has scores of ad sales reps and a strong brand in its local region (I know, “strong” is an arguable term, but let’s leave that one aside for now), I asked Petey why SFGate isn’t an aggressive player in the local online advertising market. While I can assure you Peter has very interesting plans in the content space, he chided me for my ignorance regarding the 800-pound gorilla of local markets – the Yellow Pages. “They have like 6-700 local sales people in every major region,” he told me. “They visit every merchant in town.” In other words, the Chronicle can never compete.

I then asked their opinion of an idea I have been turning over in my mind for some time – that of Yahoo becoming the new Yellow Pages. Stay with me here, it might take a while for me to explain. My idea is this: Given that Yahoo Local is a very well received service, and given that it basically builds a web page on the fly which describes a local merchant’s offerings, and given that that local merchant can upload basic content to Yahoo Local about his or her business for free, why isn’t Yahoo aggressively courting local merchants with, in essence, the equivalent of online Yellow Pages ads? Turns out, Yahoo *has* launched a rudimentary “premium” listings product (I covered it here), and I can imagine the day when that service becomes a real force in the local listings market, one that could eventually unseat the Yellow Pages, if Yahoo plays its cards right.

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News: Google Launches New Toolbar, Musings on Meaning of Beta

Spoke with Google product chief Marissa Mayer yesterday, who told me that Google is launching its third rev of its toolbar today. It's Windows only, and it's a beta: Google is not planning to auto-update current toolbar users until the bugs are worked out. I asked Marissa what the…

Toolbar2 Logo

Spoke with Google product chief Marissa Mayer yesterday, who told me that Google is launching its third rev of its toolbar today. It’s Windows only, and it’s a beta: Google is not planning to auto-update current toolbar users until the bugs are worked out.

I asked Marissa what the deal was with all the beta stuff at Google. More than 75% of their offerings are in beta, some have been there more than a year. She responded that Google was getting close to lifting beta from on a number of key products – Froogle and News were two she mentioned. But that beta means different things at Google. For client software like Desktop or Toolbar, beta is used more strictly, as in, this software ain’t ready for primetime, and we want some feedback to be sure it doesn’t bork your machine, and we intend to fix bugs and get it into general release as soon as possible.

For web apps, beta means something quite different. “We have a list of features we’d like to see in a product,” Mayer told me. Once that list is complete, the beta tag is taken off, even if the product is quite robust without them. As an example, she mentioned Froogle, which was launched without a “sort by price” feature. The product was simply not complete. When Mayer and Google feels it is complete, the beta tag will disappear.

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Yahoo Search Geek Interviewed

Over on Yahoo's Search Blog. Reiner Kraft is one serious search geek – more than 100 patents filed, apparently. From the interview: Q: Aren't you also finishing up your thesis? A: Yes, it's about domain specific search and is based on what I call iterative filtering meta search. The…

Reiner-Kraft-Sm

Over on Yahoo’s Search Blog. Reiner Kraft is one serious search geek – more than 100 patents filed, apparently. From the interview:

Q: Aren’t you also finishing up your thesis?

A: Yes, it’s about domain specific search and is based on what I call iterative filtering meta search. The idea is to leverage the search engine infrastructures to create a filtering mechanism that automatically helps you get documents for a specialized information need. For instance, we built a buying guide finder that helps you to find just buying guides.

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Is Yahoo In the Content Biz?

Yes. At least, it is getting into the business, cautiously at first, with partnerships like this one, with Showtime. Watch this space. It is going to get interesting….

Yes. At least, it is getting into the business, cautiously at first, with partnerships like this one, with Showtime. Watch this space. It is going to get interesting.

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The G-Bay Economy

Reading Bizweek (yup, the print edition) earlier this week, I noticed this article, titled "Keywords for Ad Buyers: Pay Up." (BTW, it's entirely too hard to find this stuff on B'Week's site, but that's another issue.) In the article, Ben Elgin notes Google's extraordinary earnings, then adds that Google…

Googlebot EarthReading Bizweek (yup, the print edition) earlier this week, I noticed this article, titled “Keywords for Ad Buyers: Pay Up.” (BTW, it’s entirely too hard to find this stuff on B’Week’s site, but that’s another issue.) In the article, Ben Elgin notes Google’s extraordinary earnings, then adds that Google has the enviable position of pricing power:

What accounted for the outsize profits? The high prices Google charges for search keywords, for one. Industrywide, they were up an average of 43.7% last year, according to search marketing firm iProspect.com Inc. And the most sought-after words have become far more dear: “background check” rose 258% in a year. On the day of the earnings announcement, Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt told analysts: “There does not seem to be price resistance” from advertisers.

But the pricing power cuts two ways. Elgin goes on to give eBay as an example, quoting CEO Meg Whitman:

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