Category: Of Note in Search Biz

If you recall my 2004 predictions, I claimed Bloglines would be sold to a major search engine. I just didn’t think it would be Ask. But come to think of it, it’s a good fit – Yahoo is well on their way toward the Bloglines space with its integration of MyYahoo RSS, and Google, well, Google doesn’t seem to have the appetite for RSS many wish it did. MSFT is busy getting its index up to speed.

“Ask was the best fit,” Mark Fletcher told me last week. “They have a multi-brand strategy – we will not be going away.”

Fletcher, who together with Larry’s brother Carl Page and a few others sold his other company – eGroups – to Yahoo back in the golden era for a whole lotta dough – does not need to sell. So his choice of Ask is instructive. “Ask got it,” he proclaimed, indicating others were in the hunt but did not, er, get it. “We had a lot of choices, and this one made the most sense.”

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Folks have been noticing for some time that Google Images seems to have been updated, today Google made it official. From the note sent to me by Google PR:

Today, Google announced two new updates to Google Image Search that further help users find the information they need. First, Google Image Search now includes more than 1.1 billion images from around the world. With a comprehensive index of images, users can quickly and easily find relevant images of both popular and obscure queries.

In addition, Google released a new feature that displays images from Google Image Search above Google web search results when they’re relevant to users’ search queries. When users search for queries such as [sunsets], [mountains], [torre eiffel], or [inverno] on the Google homepage, they may see relevant thumbnail images at the top

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The rumors are flying, hastened by Mary Hodder’s claim on her site. I’ll have much more to say on this later.

MediaPost reminds us (reg req’d) that thanks to some early deals via AOL (hey, smart acquisition), Time Warner now owns 8% of Google, making it the third largest outside owner. Strategic? Nope, say TW brass.

TIME WARNER NOW HOLDS AN 8 percent stake in Google, according to information filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. In Time Warner’s fourth quarter 2004 earnings report released this morning, the company said it “does not consider its remaining interest in Google to be a strategic investment,” but the position makes Time Warner the third largest outside investor in Google after two big fund managers.

The NYT canonizes that which we knew to be true: Online advertising, in particular search, has taken its place as a major force in all of marketing.

It’s now on the home page.

In other news, Ask now has a blog (where the feed, Jeeves? – Update – here it is), keyword prices drop for the first time month to month in quite a while, Rivlin has a nice piece on the “half bubble” in today’s Times, and there’s been a lot of interest in Google’s job posting for a strategic partner development manager (as I’ve said again and again, it seems obvious to me that Google will eventually get into the content middleman business.)

More than half a year ago Jeff Weiner, head of search at Yahoo, took me aside and showed me something he was personally passionate about. He called it Search Spots – and the idea was really cool. It’s been done before in various contexts, but the idea was very well implemented and totally integrated with Yahoo and your browser in general – basically, anything you might be reading can become fodder for an inline search. From the email I received from Yahoo PR:

Last Christmas Jeff saw a news headline for the #1 single in the UK and wanted to learn more about the artist, watch the video, maybe buy the CD. It took him about 20 minutes to search for all this information. In a staff meeting he addressed this issue and asked folks around the table how long they felt it should take to access this type of related information – the consensus was it should only take seconds – but the current search experience was so linear it was prohibitive. 

In parallel, one of our top engineers (and top search innovators) was off in his spare time creating a prototype to address the exact same pain point that Jeff was sharing with his staff. Y! Q. This product was not on the roadmap for product development but demonstrated such tremendous value to the user experience that it was greenlighted and set into production. With limited resources, he and his team went to work to create what is going to be pushed live late tonight on (next.yahoo.com) as a test product.

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Thanks to Rich, founder of Topix, for this heads up, and congrats!