From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Inside Google, news of a major Google data center – $300 million was the figure bandied about. That buys a lot of CPUs…….
Friendster and Eurekster have teamed up to allow search based on the filter of your social networks. SearchDay has the goods….
Thanks to Seth Goldstein (his blog is a good readBTW), I get fresh research from his company Majestic, and it always has interesting stuff. They're having a small internet conference in NYC next week, and I was supposed to go, but I bagged out so I can work on the…
Thanks to Seth Goldstein (his blog is a good readBTW), I get fresh research from his company Majestic, and it always has interesting stuff. They’re having a small internet conference in NYC next week, and I was supposed to go, but I bagged out so I can work on the book. Sorry Seth. But thanks for the great insights, keep em coming.
Today’s insights have to do with Google. My headline? On average, Google gets nearly a dime for every search it serves in the US. A recent report from Majestic, based on proprietary Comscore data as well as Majestic’s own panels and other sources, notes:
– 98 percent of GOOG revs are from paid search. 65% of revs are domestic.
– Q3 domestic growth driven by 7% quarter to quarter increase in paid introductions (paid clicks), to 964 million, and a 2% quarter to quarter increase in average price per click, to 5%.
– Average CPC: 54 cents, up a cent quarter to quarter.
– Revenue per query grew 8.3% quarter to quarter to nine cents. (That’s right, every search we do on Google makes them nearly a dime, on average).
– Overall US searches grew 6% quarter to quarter, Google powered searches grew by .2%.
– In Q2, 51.9% of all searches on the Google Network included at least one paid listing.
– Of those, 32% include at least one paid introduction.
Another contextual ad player enters the space, this one with the experience of having served the keyword-driven graphical banners on eBay for the past 18 months. AdMarketplace takes the auction based approach of paid search, but for graphical banners. It's been around for a while, so I guess this is…
Another contextual ad player enters the space, this one with the experience of having served the keyword-driven graphical banners on eBay for the past 18 months.
AdMarketplace takes the auction based approach of paid search, but for graphical banners. It’s been around for a while, so I guess this is a relaunch. If it’s any good, expect Google and Yahoo, not to mention MSFT, to take a long hard build/buy look at the company.
I am talking to the CEO soon, I hope. My first question: why not scale this to the tail? Can bloggers play?
Read MoreWhoa! Gary notes that AdSense Image, itself a test program, is planning on taking animated gifs for a test group soon. From the site: Enhanced image ads Google will soon be expanding its image ad program to include a wider variety of creative formats. We'll be accepting animated GIFs from…
Whoa! Gary notes that AdSense Image, itself a test program, is planning on taking animated gifs for a test group soon. From the site:
Enhanced image ads
Google will soon be expanding its image ad program to include a wider variety of creative formats. We’ll be accepting animated GIFs from a small test group of advertisers, and you’ll be able to display these ads on your pages! The new ads will still adhere to the 50KB size limit, and will be reviewed according to our editorial guidelines for image ads. You can opt in to image ads from within your publisher account – for full instructions, please refer to the AdSense FAQ.
Read MoreRemember iWon? Yeah, a chance of winning cash for every search. It worked – sold to Ask Jeeves (with parent ISH) for a pretty good sum. Now comes word of Blingo, a search engine that launches Thursday. It will give away prizes on random searches. The engine is based on…
Remember iWon? Yeah, a chance of winning cash for every search. It worked – sold to Ask Jeeves (with parent ISH) for a pretty good sum. Now comes word of Blingo, a search engine that launches Thursday. It will give away prizes on random searches. The engine is based on Gigablast results (is this the first deal for them? Gigablast is the one man band out of New Mexico, much lauded for doing so much with so little…).
In any case, Blingo has gotten coverage from SEW’s Danny Sullivan today, and I have been going back and forth with the CEO, Frank Anderson, who wants to clear a few things up. From his note to me:
I believe Danny Sullivan… was coming from the perspective that we’re not going to be able to beat Google with a prize / sweepstakes model. I wholeheartedly agree, and we don’t have such grand plans. We know our place in this market and simply hope to build a nice niche audience by doing things the right way — a great user experience and great prizes. …
It is certainly fair to use iWon as a reference point for Blingo because of the Sweepstakes angle, but the similarities end there. To be fair, Blingo has been implemented in a very user-friendly manner (no registration, spam, etc.) and strips away almost all of the nonsense typically associated with Sweepstakes.
With the news that Google has locked down googlereviews.com, incorporated reviews (of sorts) into Froogle, re-launched Google Groups in a bid to get competitive with Yahoo, started to update Blogger, has released desktop search (with its obvious developer platform implications), and is quickly scaling Local with mobile and the like,…
Not totally unrelated side note: I just got a new ping (IE, the pose was just updated in some way) on a year-old Adam Bosworth essay germane to all this. A worthy re-read. I wonder if he’s pondering this as he drives new stuff to market at Google these days…
Or lack thereof. From Wired News: WIRED: Most news sites employ humans to try to pull together balanced content. Why not hire a few people to guard against bias? BHARAT: Google News is not in the business of having humans regulate how much representation there is from the Republicans…
Or lack thereof. From Wired News:
WIRED: Most news sites employ humans to try to pull together balanced content. Why not hire a few people to guard against bias?
BHARAT: Google News is not in the business of having humans regulate how much representation there is from the Republicans in response to a certain query and how much is from Democrats. Once you start doing that job, there is a huge responsibility, and we’d rather allow the natural distribution of a given query to surface. I think that having people look at the hundreds of thousands of articles that come in every day is just not practical. Bias may have happened once or twice on certain queries. I don’t think the problem is widespread….The truth is, Google News doesn’t have a point of view. It’s a computer, and computers do not understand these topics the way humans do and can’t be systematically biased in any direction.
Bharat is the lead developer of Google News. I have to say, this issue has always stuck in my craw. While I grok the concept of a “computer having no bias,” I also fall back to the fact that somebody programmed that computer, to look for specific keywords, to do certain kinds of matching, to query certain sources and not others. The bias isn’t directly human bias, the point of view isn’t directly human point of view, but it’s nevertheless bias, is it not? Or am I missing something?
For local businesses dependent on the Yellow Pages economy, there's nothing more important that the telephone, especially when it rings. The idea of uniting phone leads and search is something of a holy grail in local search, and CitySearch today announced another milestone in its quest for the same. Release…
For local businesses dependent on the Yellow Pages economy, there’s nothing more important that the telephone, especially when it rings. The idea of uniting phone leads and search is something of a holy grail in local search, and CitySearch today announced another milestone in its quest for the same. Release in extended entry.
]]>
From Electricnews.net, an Irish-based business and finance site, an story about Urs Holzle's European recruitment tour. "Nobody has tried to hook together so many PCs… You have to be able to deal with failures and make the whole system continue to work," Holzle, one of the first 10 employees of…
“Nobody has tried to hook together so many PCs… You have to be able to deal with failures and make the whole system continue to work,” Holzle, one of the first 10 employees of Google, told ElectricNews.Net.
To work in such an environment, Google employees must be creative and work well in a team, and must also be the type of employee that does not take their job too seriously, he claimed. “Employment at Google should be 60 to 70 percent fun,” he said, “the rest is blood, sweat and tears.” Holzle also noted that even the company interview process is reflective of this overall attitude, claiming that prospective workers are not confronted with a test of their technical knowledge, but will be carefully judged on whether they “fit” within the Google team.
Read More