Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Interesting – search for business professionals…Here’s my search. I had no idea.

A9 has debuted a neat new local search product today, which I am covering for Business 2.0 (the actual story will post shortly, this link is to a blog entry about the story on B 2’s blog). This is a big deal for A9, and for Amazon – a blending of search and commerce models that has some interesting implications. Excerpt:

In short, Manber and co. (urged on by Jeff Bezos, who Manber says was “very involved”) strapped GPS-enabled digital video camera-cum-terabyte server rigs to the top of a bunch of SUVs, then drove them around the commercial areas of major US metropolitan areas, recording what then became composite still pictures of entire cities, one address at a time. A9 took more than 20 million images of 14 million+ businesses across ten cities (more are coming soon), then created a local search application they call Block View.

UPDATE: Here’s the actual story I wrote….

Thomas Hawk wonders.

Now I know that Google was criticized a while back regarding the staleness of their images and that an upgrade was promised but I’d yet to see anything official announced. Over the past two weeks the traffic being driven to my site from Google’s Image Search has continued to grow and (if you combine their various international sites) Google Image Search has now become my top referring entity to thomashawk.com……

…If I do a search for “rain” under large images, my photo titled “San Francisco Rain” (see below) is on the first page of over 270,000 large images of “rain.” Wow, how did I get so lucky? Is it because the picture is actually pretty good as I’d like to believe? Is someone manually reviewing and ranking images at Google? Or is it because I publish using blogger or that I upload my photos to the internet using Hello Picasa (both Google properties)?

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Via GB’d: Hmmm. Check this out. Philipp found a Google employee who was posting openly about Google, and has some excerpts from the posts on his site. Am getting smart on this but…Seems a fellow started at Google, starting blogging about Google, said some not so nice things and probably violated internal policies to boot, and then quickly blanked his posts. This is his site (ninetyninezeroes – get it?). Empty, for the most part. And no Google cache or URL info. Clearly his site is not in Google’s index – I searched for some of the strings in the text Phillip has on his site, not there. His site is on Blogger, and had been up long enough for Google to index it, certainly. So, it seems, the site has been taken out manually, something Google claims to never do.

However, I did find it in Yahoo’s cache.

And here is even more – including a discourse on Google’s benefits, and an overview of a Google party at last week’s sales conference in SF. Highlights:

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I am sure this will re-ignite the browser speculation, but I think the thing after the browser, whatever it may be, is far more interesting to speculate upon.

Thanks for the tip, Steve.

Interesting piece in B’week online on how this hardware company prospered by building servers for Google and Yahoo…the company is set to file for an IPO shortly…

I was briefed on this last week, and will have a longer report later today. Suffice to say, Google Video Search launched today. It’s quite distinct from Yahoo and other’s approach….

Coverage here.

BTW, Yahoo Video Search beta is now on the home page. I am sure this had nothing to do with the Google news….

It’s all over the web today. Look, I was the one to pooh pooh GMail on April 1st, so I’ll stay away from saying this is ridiculous speculation.

I’ve been meaning to write about adMarketplace, a new advertising service, ever since I spoke to its CEO a month or so ago. But I wanted to try it out for myself first, much as I have AdBrite (the network you see on the right over there, which by the way announced (sub req’d) its funding from Sequoia Capital today). I haven’t had the time to do that yet, though I certainly intend to shortly. In any case, today adMarketplace announced an interesting affiliate program that allows publishers to earn revenue for introducing advertisers into the network – if you, as a publisher, are responsible for getting an advertiser signed up, you get a piece of that advertiser’s revenue across the network, even if the ads are not on your site. An interesting idea and one that feels like a step toward my Publisher Driven (nee Sell Side) Advertising model.

AdMarketplace is the company behind eBay’s ad market, a background which serves as both an endorsement and a limitation, when it debuted last year, reviews were mixed. Jim Walton of adMarketplace tells me that it is his intention to quickly grow his network, and he hopes to implement a self service sign up a la AdSense shortly. More when I actually find the time to grok the system, probably later in Feb.

PS – In Davos now, jetlagged but happy to be in the snow…