Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Oh, I know, I’m not big on enterprise search, it puts me to sleep. But to be honest, it was the enterprise that got me into this game, nearly 20 years ago, at a now defunct Macintosh weekly called MacWeek. We covered “MVBs” – Macintosh Volume Buyers, and my best sources were big corporate buyers at Anderson and the University of Texas. These guys saw all the cool shit early, and then blabbed about it to me. Our fearless executive editor was a fellow named Dan Farber, who now runs editorial at ZDNet. Anyway, Dan emailed me yesterday and asked what I thought of enterprise search, which is clearly one of the most overlooked stories in search. (His view on it is now up, here). It made me think, and I realized that in fact, enterprise search will probably rise again, and end up being one of the coolest things in search in the next few years. Why? Because it sucks so badly now, fixing it will be the kind of 10X revelation we had when we moved from Yahoo to Google in 1998-99.

Germane to that, here’s an interview in the E-commerce Times with Google enterprise search chief Dave Girouard that’s interesting.

The funny part is it’s easier to find box scores from the 1957 World Series than it is to find last quarter’s sales presentation in the enterprise. While Web search has gotten really good, enterprise search has stagnated, and that’s why we really believe it’s a problem that needs to be solved and that Google has a unique set of capabilities to solve it.”

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Another (this is the third in two days) big NYT piece on Google, this one is from Saul Hansell, with great artwork (see left). Saul explores the debate between staying private and going public. And it had this tidbit, which I am embarassed to say I did not know:

Google has hardly been lazy working to manage the timing of an eventual offering. Early on, it split itself into two companies, Google Inc. and Google Technologies, so that each would have fewer than 500 employees, according to a person who had been close to Google. That was important because the S.E.C. requires companies with 500 shareholders and assets greater than $10 million to file financial statements and most of the other information they would have to disclose in a public share offering.

Early in 2003, the two companies were merged, in effect setting the date of April 29, 2004, as the deadline for Google to make the required disclosure. (The law requires a public filing 120 days after the close of a company’s fiscal year, in this case April 29.)

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Interesting: Markoff has a source (link is CC Times, not NYT, it’s not reg required) who claims Google will not file an S-1 this week (the standard IPO prospectus) but rather will file … well…on that the story is not clear. But something. I believe the only thing they could file other than an S-1 is a Form 10, which private companies file when they surpass 500 shareholders and 10 million in assets. Markoff’s story does not say that will happen, but that’s the implication. There’s some good stuff in this short piece:

Google, the Web search company that has developed a huge popular following around the world, is expected to take a tentative first step next week toward a future public stock offering, a person close to the company said Friday. But it is likely to stop short of filing a formal registration to sell shares, he said……

At an employee meeting last month, the company’s executives stated that Google had embarked on the path toward a public offering. They did not give any information, however, about the possible timing of the effort.

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It’s a Google News Friday. Roundup:

– Cnet reports on Google’s safe search, which it claims is too restrictive.

– Google rethinks its policy on hate sites (considering labels. I say, let the community label in aggregate..but what do I know).

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