Category: Of Note in Search Biz

In an email conversation, Danny Sullivan (he of Search Engine Watch fame) and I recently were discussing last week’s post on Froogle. Danny disagreed with my premise that Google’s actions were inconsistent, in fact, he believes they may well be consistent with a new and evolving interface approach that he calls “invisible tabs.” He explains the idea here. The gist: search engines will intuit what you are looking for behind the scenes, and deliver to you the results most consistent with that intuition, making the tab format redundant in the first place.

As Danny put it in an email to me:

The real departure is going to be if Google finally makes the jump and gives you back 10 product/Froogle results at some point, and suggest that you might also search the web, for some queries, rather than the web dominance we get now. That will be them fully putting into play this whole invisible tabs concept that I’ve been talking about recently.

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Because it’s poised to grow to nearly $3 billion in revenues by 2008, up from about $1 billion now. And because the mass of small business owners who currently don’t use search would certainly switch if presented a compelling solution that actually brings in customers. Can you imagine your corner grocery store or dry cleaner buying keyword search? Me too. Move over, Yellow Pages….

Before there was the web, there was the corporate database. Remember those days? Back in the mid to late 80s, when the Local Area Network was the Next Big Thing, when everyone was madly installing client-server databases, when applications like dBase III and NetWare ruled the roost? You don’t? Sigh. I must be showing my age. I was a cub reporter back then, covering the relatively new beat of “networking” as well as the corporate database market. Yup. Somehow I found that stuff fascinating. I thought this whole idea of connecting disparate networks of information was a hoot.

Anyway, to the point. About 1987 or so a new class of applications developed. Called Executive Information Systems (EIS), these were essentially interfaces to data, designed to live on top of corporate databases and cull the stuff Really Important Executives needed to know so as to make Really Important Decisions. The coolest part of the spec was the fact that the data was queried from the desktop – EIS promised easy and intuitive access those unintelligible databases the geeks kept buying. The idea was sexy, but the category never really took off. The design was too rules based, too top down. For them to work, you had to literally redesign your entire infrastructure. Oh, and the Executives in question had to give a shit.

Fast forward to now. As most of the world remains fascinated with search’s more public face, a significant shift seems to be occurring in the corporate data world. I’m not saying EIS is back, exactly, but the overwhelming presumption of webwide search on your desktop is certainly rewiring how corporations think about their more private databanks. A robust market has grown up around “enterprise search,” (some companies, such as FAST, were spun off from consumer search companies, and Google maintains a unit focused on the market). There’s a crop of interesting startups to boot, including Tim Bray’s company, Antarctica. It’s entirely possible some of the next big ideas in search may well be developed in this more focused, less public field. Any readers out there have suggestions of cool companies in this space I may be overlooking?

I keep meaning to do this…I’ve noticed a bunch of net-based aggregators out there, I’d be curious if anyone uses them. One of the earliest is Bloglines, founded by the same fellow behind eGroups. There’s also a new one over at Feedster call myFeedster. And there’s FastBuzz. And of course the one Meg’s working on, Kinja (still in stealth).

I just read a piece by Bambi Francisco (it’s here, scroll down in the story) in which she claimed in passing that typing “ugg boots” into the main page at Google returned a subcategory of results – above the regular “pure” search results but distinct from the advertising – called “Product Search.” I tried it in quotes – “ugg boots” – and it didn’t work. Without quotes – ugg boots – it did. I then tried “digital camera” and there it was again.

What do you know – a new class of results (from Froogle, see my earlier post which missed this) nested rather uncomfortably between the sponsored results at the top and on the right side, and the pure results below. Also interesting was the fact that the results were in the same white background as the regular “pure” search results, though they are distinct in look and feel.

This is a very interesting development with significant implications. Many would claim this is a major step toward Yahoo or MSN-like approaches on the part of Google. Others would argue that Google in fact is simply trying to do its users a favor, inferring that most searchers who type such queries are in fact in shopping mode. But it is a clear departure from the conceit – and I use that term nuetrally – that Google has always maintained, which is that the results offered by their engine are free of human intervention – that they in fact reflect the results of a carefully tended algorithmic secret sauce applied to every site without bias. Clearly, humans have decided to put that category of Product Search on top of the main results. And certainly those results are not subject to the same secret sauce which sifts the rest of the unwashed web. (One can imagine merchants racing to game Froogle, now that Froogle results are showing up – in first position no less – on the firehose of traffic that is the main results page of Google). No matter how you slice it, this marks a departure.

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HC Intl. Inc., a provider of “business information through trade catalogs and yellow pages directories, search engine services, and television and print periodicals in China” went public Weds., and shares were nearly 10 times oversubscribed. The IPO roared out of the gate, and closed 34% higher than its opening, on a weak market day. IDG Ventures, based here, held nearly 20% of the company pre-IPO.

MediaPost reports that top members of the team behind Sprinks, which Google recently purchased and essentially folded into AdWords (why?see here), have landed at Kanoodle. Kanoodle also got a round of funding, and opened an office in NYC. They have a keyword search product, and will probably add contextual and local advertising products next. It’s a sign of the robust market around paid search, and a good thing that companies besides Overture and Google can continue to thrive.

Amazon is not the only one experimenting with making print available online. This is a Big Deal….

One of the most talked about companies in the paid search analytics business is Go Toast, which makes a business of helping companies optimize and analyze their paid search campaigns. I always expected they would be in line for acquisition, perhaps by a large agency like IPG or Omnicom. Instead, Go Toast has been purchased by Atlas DMT, a unit of aQuantive (AQNT), which is a public roll up of several online agencies and services, including longtime survivor Avenue A.

SearchDay summarizes Google’s recent update to Froogle. The update is not a total redesign, nor a clear statement by Google that it wants to jump in full throttle, like Yahoo has (Google has yet to take off the “beta” moniker). Shopping engines in the main present something of a challenge for Google – by their nature they invite commercially-driven presentation of results, and Google is best known for its “pure” or “natural” results. As Ninj pointed out to me last week, at Yahoo Shopping they believe that shoppers *expect* to be marketed to while in shopping mode – the metaphor she used was Yellow Pages. Those who paid more, have more credibility and larger ads, and that means something to shoppers. Such an approach is not exactly dead center to Google’s overall brand values, but neither does it directly contradict them. It is worth noting that the company updated Froogle in time for the holiday season and has been promoting it for several days in a row. To wit: the phrase “Shopping? Try Froogle – Google’s product search service” appears on the main page. Google product managers tell me it’s extremely difficult to get a promo for anything onto that home page, as they count every bit on that page, each additional bit slows down performance. Clearly, a decision has been made that this is important to the company, and by extension, to the company’s users.