Category: Uncategorized

Dave says with Orkut, Google is one step closer to being our trusted agent for ecommerce transactions, comment aggregation, and much more. He likens it to the Liberty Alliance, or MSFT Passport…

Markoff gets ahold of an internal Google memo, throws in some Davos scenery and a few very interesting and fresh facts, and voila, the Times has a piece on The Coming Search Wars.

The Google Might Be The Next Netscape meme is warmed over, as is the MSFT Might Integrate Search Into Longhorn concept. Might? Will….The IPO As Disruptor idea is also given a curtain call. This piece proves once again that the Times can’t get enough of Google stories. Or, more to the point, we as readers can’t get enough.

Regardless of whether the typical outside-the-Valley reader cares, Markoff has some really good stuff in here. Eric Schmidt on MSFT’s open source views:

Read More

Mary Hodder has a good post over at biplog about the new push in Congress to overturn Feist. Feist is the case which established you can’t copyright facts, like, say phone numbers, or the temperature outside. Congress is looking to change all that, and that is not a good thing. The EFF has a page on how to make your voice heard here.

Why does Searchblog care about this? Lock down facts, and search is much less useful.

Search Tuna – yes, Search Tuna, is a registration site that purports to take search deeper – like a tuna diving deep in the sea. Yikes, the metaphors, migod. But, in any case, I registered, and I’m going to check it out. Thanks to Tim Bray for the pointer. Tim is surfacing all sorts of cool stuff in search ever since his On Search articles were highlighted in SEW.

Anyway, as to Search Tuna. Some tidbits from their “about” page:

Search Tuna performs a live, customized web search for you. This takes some time, but our goal is to always get you the best results possible. In this sense, Search Tuna is a results engine.

Read More

But orkut keeps chuggin nonetheless. Xeni sounds off about how she can’t seem to bail from the system (I think they never considered that anyone would *ever* want to leave…), Marc gets tossed in jail without a phone call or a lawyer, Corante is not pleased (pointing out that negative posts and comments about orkut have been deleted from the system, at least early on),danah has a more than a few pointed words as well (and 19 trackbacks and counting…). Folks, the buzz ain’t so good. What to make of it?

Well, I think it’s fascinating, but I’m writing a book about search, and watching Google manage this particular herd of cats is simply too interesting to look away. So here’s my comment, for what it’s worth: pretending that this is not a Google project is disingenuous. Orkut *is* a Google project. End of story. Even if it wasn’t intended to be, it is. And the folks at Google know that as important as the influencers in tech might be, orkut, in the end, is about the folks who could give a crap about the blogosphere. I’ll wager they’ll ride out the initial bad reviews, and hope the masses join up. Unless, of course, a few major journalists write it up as a bust. It’s rather like the Dean campaign, no? Are Xeni and danah providing the primal scream?

According to reports surfacing via the Times in London, CEO Schmidt is telling private investors that he is in no hurry to go public, especially given how much cash his company is already generating. The race to claim the Second Coming of the Bubble seems dealt a setback.

Silicon.com, Times of London commentary, and news story.

It keeps coming. PubSub is a RSS-based aggregator that allows you to sign up for search-term-based alerts, then emails you (or updates your RSS reader) when something is posted that matches your search. Signing up is painless, as it should be. It’s Google News Alerts for the RSS-osphere. Cool. Does Feedster or T’rati do this? I am starting to feel like keeping up with this stuff is a full time job. Man, we need a publication covering just this space…thanks to Dave Winer for the pointer.

If you’ve never checked out Technorati, now’s a good time to do so. The service hoovers up blog links and postings and offers a search engine which does a great job of monitoring the zeitgiest, and your (or any other) blog’s place in it. The possibilities of such an engine are extremely interesting. In any case, Sifry & Co. have taken the wraps off a new beta release. David Sifry, the CEO and man-behind-the-curtain, blogs the changes here. He concentrated on infrastructure: “We focused 100% of our time on completely refurbishing our underlying event engine – essentially taking a volkswagen engine out and putting a Ferrari engine in.” This means faster indexing and querying, and a more scalable back-end database. There’s still bugs, and still open questions (I love this one, for example), but go bang on it for yourself…

This news came more than a day ago, and I decided to hold off on discussing it, as it felt like a nuisance suit. But the more I think about it, the more I sense this could be something of a big deal. Way back in 1999, Playboy sued Netscape, which was at that time still a major player in the web advertising wars, for misuse of its trademarks. At issue was Netscape’s advertising model, known then as keying – the practice of selling specific advertising that would appear when users typed in certain search terms (basically paid search, but an earlier form). Netscape, and later Excite, were selling keywords to companies capitalizing on Playboy’s trademarks. The suit was dismissed, then appealed, and yesterday we learned that the Ninth Circuit has upheld Playboy’s right to sue.

Now, the defending parties are either gone (Excite) or mere shadows of their former selves (Netscape), but Playboy intends to pursue the suit anyway. This case is not an anomaly, as Stephanie Olsen points out in her piece covering it. Google, among others, has been the target of several suits, and has recently asked the courts to clarify this issue, one clearly central to its business model. Late last summer, Google acquiesced to portions of an eBay request that Google not allow its advertisers to bid or buy on keyphrases that included the eBay brand.

The question here is of balance. Where and how do you draw the line as to what is a misuse of a trademark, and what is not? If we have to depend on the courts every time someone wants to use a word that also happens to be trademarked, the chilling effect on paid search could be significant.

Yesterday Yahoo CEO Semel gave a timeline for when his company would drop Google for Yahoo’s own internal search technology: this quarter. This has a limited effect on Google’s revenues – Yahoo paid Google less than $10 million a year to license its organic search listings, and has never used Google’s AdWords, where the real money is. But the effect could be argued to be more psychological, and oddly, good for Google.

Google is widely understood to be the 800-pound gorilla of search, and whispers of “monopolist” have begun popping up from time to time (not particularly well-thought-out whispers, but real nonetheless). Certainly whenever journalists cover search, they quote the “Google owns 80 percent of the search market” meme. With Yahoo’s distribution gone, Google may well benefit from the sense that there is more balance in the market. Once it is perceived to be battling much larger companies like MSFT and Yahoo, companies that have as large if not a larger share of the organic search market, Google may again become the internet’s underdog, a position I sense it might very well prefer.