Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Mark Cuban, as entertaining a fellow as you might ever find in sports or technology, revealed in a filing yesterday that he owns more than six percent of Mamma.com. The stock is up nearly 30% today.

PS – Mark has a blog and discusses his investment here….

(all hail Gary)

As I pointed out earlier, Kanoodle is a company formed essentially in opposition: It was founded by the execs behind About’s Sprinks contextual advertising service, after that service was bought and then discontinued by Google. eWeek today has a good overview of their plans. Excerpt:

ContextTarget, and its upcoming expansion, determines the placement of ads on the bidding for particular content categories rather than on keywords in the content, Josephson said.

Kanoodle.com maps the table of contents of partner sites to build its categories and match appropriate ads, he explained. The automated program will use the same approach but more dynamically map Web publishers’ pages to ContextTarget’s categories.

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I’ve pinged MetaCarta before, when they got more than $6 million from Sevin Rosen, but Shore points me to a good overview of MetaCarta’s technology in Directions magazine. Geo-located content/search has been something of a blind spot for me, reading through this helped a lot. Seems MetaCarta does something akin to WebFountain, but only for location-specific information. Geolocation unlocks all sorts of interesting applications, in fact, the concept came up several times in my conversations with Bill Joy this past Friday. Watch this space.

OnGoing to Sun…

Coneteq, the next Google…from Lebanon. I’m thinking of creating a section on my site for engines which claim to be the next Google…the “US consultant” who is pushing this new engine points out w/r/t Google:

“Their pre-tax profit last year was $350 million. That’s not bad for a couple of guys,” he said, reiterating the often-cited fact that one of the founders, Sergey Brin, is a Russian émigré while the other, Larry Page, is a hippie.

That’s how we win! Call em hippies!

Jerry visits his hometown (Taipei) and sits for an interview with the Taipei Times. Interesting to hear Jerry, who is not often in the press, talk about competition with Google, Yahoo’s strategy, etc. Excerpts (sounds a bit like it’s been translated from English to Chinese to English, though I have no idea…):

As Microsoft also uses our technology, it means that nearly 50 percent of all searches in the world use Yahoo technology. This coverage gives us the advantage of learning more about consumer behavior and what they want to find, which is a foundation for us to improve ourselves on…

I think I will be a Yahoo lifer, since I still have a lot of passion for it. The Internet is becoming the most important medium, because it is unrestricted from time and space. The Internet revolution has, and will continue, to bring profound influence on people’s life and culture, making it more potential than the time I established Yahoo. Therefore, I will keep contributing to this field to explore the potential of this technology, as well as my own brainchild, until I’m too old to move.

Had a nice chat earlier in the week with Yahoo’s Tim Cadogan, who in the face of the paid inclusion dust up has been given, or perhaps even has willingly taken, the role of Explain It, Then Explain It Again Yahoo. Tim knows from controversy and market overreaction, he was at Overture before paid search was cool, and there are some similarities to how the market is reacting to Yahoo’s CAP program. Namely, he believes, the whole content acquisition program, misunderstood now, will eventually be seen as a rational approach to the market, and, ultimately will lead to a much more robust search experience.

Now, I stand by what I wrote earlier, that CAP forces the issue of trust and transparency to the fore, and most small business owners (arguably those most affected by this program) are not yet ready to trust a big company like Yahoo. They feel coerced to pay up, mainly by fear of missing something if they don’t. Tim said he understood these sentiments, and said that only time will prove that CAP has no influence over ranking. He also points out that CAP is entirely optional, and that Yahoo’s goal is to crawl the entire web as throughly as possible, regardless of paid inclusion.

I pointed out to him that if Yahoo could simply state that its organic crawl and resultant index was as comprehensive and fresh as Google’s, then perhaps folks would see that CAP is simply an added value service for URL submission, reports, and the like. Tim responded that indeed, Yahoo stands by its index and results as the equal of Google, and again time will tell.

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Gary points us to this speech by the CEO of Northern Light, David Seuss. (Gary also links to Suess’ ppt slides). Interesting, Suess says the future of search is intelligent, human edited databases that are subject specific. The Google approach will stop scaling, if it hasnt’ already, he predicts. (Recall that Northern Light was an early innovator in search which Suess bought out of bankruptcy last year).

Stata Labs’ Bloomba gets a rave, of sorts, in Fast Company. The company Demo’d at Demo last month. Demo guru Chris Shipley called it “the Google of email.”

The bottom line: Bloomba 1.0 is an incredibly innovative product that turns the way we think about email entirely on its head. Searching, not power-foldering, is probably the wave of the future for serious email communicators. But it’s not yet ready for prime time

(thanks, Hylton)

Another roundup on the search landscape over at the Herring (registration required). Most interesting find: iPhrase, which provides intelligent “self service” search for corporate clients interested in creating better experiences for their customers online. Schwab apparently is using it to good end. And Gary points out ha tif you want to demo the tech, head over to Lycos’s stock screener application…