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“eBay Is Search!”

A very kind reader (I'll buy the drinks next time) has forwarded me eBay's recent analyst day presentation (from earlier in the month). This reader's comment: "The focus on search was VERY new…analysts were trying to figure out the significance." Indeed, one of the slides declares: "eBay is Search!"…

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A very kind reader (I’ll buy the drinks next time) has forwarded me eBay’s recent analyst day presentation (from earlier in the month). This reader’s comment: “The focus on search was VERY new…analysts were trying to figure out the significance.” Indeed, one of the slides declares: “eBay is Search!”

A couple of things come to mind when reviewing the slides (there were more than 300,covering the entire business, both US and int’l). First, eBay knows that the faster and more relevant they can make their internal search, the better their margins. They understand that they have a marketplace of people with very specific intents, looking for very specific things. The easier eBay can make it for folks to find what they want (whether it’s a bid, an item, or a comparison), the better their bottom line looks. Toward this end, eBay has built its own internal search engine called Voyager, which is optimized for eBay users. One of the slides in the analyst presentation boasts: “We are world class at analyzing our user base.”

Second and possibly more important is the role of search in customer acquisition. eBay has a world class IT solution in place to monitor tens of thousands of paid keywords across the web, each with its own P&L and analytics. I can’t confirm this, but I would not be surprised if eBay is Google’s largest customer, something that probably makes both companies uncomfortable, because each can analyze the other’s data and mine it for competitive edge. In the presentation eBay also notes the power of natural or algorithmic search (the “pure” results) – the company says it is revamping its entire site to optimize for natural search. Now that’s quite a statement. Again, major thanks to my source for this information.

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First Look at USBancorp Online Ad Projections: Next Year Projected to Match Best of Boom

Among the analysts still covering the internet after the great wipe out of 2001, Safa Rashtchy, of Piper Jaffray, has received the most notice as an early and ardent supporter of search. His company will soon come out with a new report forecasting online advertising revenues (Safa is credited…


Among the analysts still covering the internet after the great wipe out of 2001, Safa Rashtchy, of Piper Jaffray, has received the most notice as an early and ardent supporter of search. His company will soon come out with a new report forecasting online advertising revenues (Safa is credited with pegging the paid search segment of the market at a widely reported figure of nearly $7 billion by 2007). In his recent newsletter, which summarizes a conference Piper hosted on online advertising, Safa predicts revenues will sharply accelerate, to more than $15 billion by 2008. Also, he predicts that online ad revenues will match 2000’s number of $8.1 billion – the height of the boom – by next year. My guess: he’s wrong – when the counting’s done, 2004 will beat 2000 by a comfortable margin.

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A Couple of Cultural Commentaries

I'm offline most of today, but enough folks have passed me these two sites as interesting cultural outgrowths of search that I'll post them here for your review. The first, GoogleRace, plugs into the Google API and ranks each candidate by keyword searches. Some of the tops searches are…

I’m offline most of today, but enough folks have passed me these two sites as interesting cultural outgrowths of search that I’ll post them here for your review. The first, GoogleRace, plugs into the Google API and ranks each candidate by keyword searches. Some of the tops searches are “large penis” and “George Bush is going to lose”. (Thanks Kenny..)

Googlehouse, on the other hand, is more understated. This is an attempt to make a cultural commentary through images – the site polls the Google Image search database and pulls up images that fit various parts of an imaginary house. Click around a bit, if you’ve got the time. This kind of stuff usually pushes my MEGO button, but…give it a looksee. (Thanks Tim…)

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Looksmart Launches FindArticles…So Far I’ve Found A Lot of Press Releases

Looksmart today announced a major update to FindArticles, a great idea whose execution so far I can't quite endorse. The service – which has its own tab on the Looksmart site – has "over 3.5 million articles from over 700 publications." While I've not explored it fully, a search…

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Looksmart today announced a major update to FindArticles, a great idea whose execution so far I can’t quite endorse. The service – which has its own tab on the Looksmart site – has “over 3.5 million articles from over 700 publications.” While I’ve not explored it fully, a search for various folks who I know are subjects of major magazine pieces turns up a boatload of BusinessWire-type press releases. Not sure how that matches up with expectations of “articles from 700 publications…” but I hope they clean it up, because it could be a great service.

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Yellow Pages – All Growth Is Digital

A new study says the Yellow Pages will continue to grow but…there's a catch. I've taken to quoting the current size of the Yellow Pages market – $26 billion or so – as proof there's a lot of growth left in search. After all, if non-local search is about…


A new study says the Yellow Pages will continue to grow but…there’s a catch. I’ve taken to quoting the current size of the Yellow Pages market – $26 billion or so – as proof there’s a lot of growth left in search. After all, if non-local search is about $2-3 billion this year, and is poised to undermine the local Yellow Pages market due to its nascent push into local search, that’s a rather large market to grow into. But a study by the Kelsey Group, made public by eMarketer today, says that the Yellow Pages themselves will also grow in the next five years, to $36 billion. However, a full 23% of that 2008 revenue – about $10 billion – will be “digital directory” Yellow Pages – yup, paid local search.
OK, so the math is: Yellow Pages is a $26 billion biz now, growing to $36 billion by 2008, a $10 billion increase. Local Yellow Pages “Digital Directory” is – well not much now (as far as I can tell it’s not even in the current $26 billion number), but it will be $10 billion by 2008. Given that the local search piece of the business is quite small today, and the online yellow pages is probably no more than $300 million, if that, what this study really seems to say is that the lion’s share of ALL growth in Yellow Pages will be digital. In other words, there will NO growth in the Yellow Pages market, if it weren’t for online search. Now that I can buy into.

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More on Same…

The Boston Globe also has a "worm turns" piece here, and one of the key sources in the piece takes offense at how his quotes were used…Another source (Dave Winer) also feels wronged… I find this kind of journalism, where reporters try so hard to make quotes fit into a…

The Boston Globe also has a “worm turns” piece here, and one of the key sources in the piece takes offense at how his quotes were used…Another source (Dave Winer) also feels wronged… I find this kind of journalism, where reporters try so hard to make quotes fit into a pre-concieved notion of how a story should play, the most irritating thing in business reporting today. In this case, it’s not the Google Is Wonderful Look At All The Lava Lamps angle, it’s the opposite: Google Is Making Enemies And Is Too Big For Its Britches. Neither is right. Ugh.

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Must…Put…Google…On…The Cover

Fortune this week proves that the worm can turn in the mainstream media's coverage of all stories, even one that for years has proven my predictions wrong. At least 18 months ago I was cluck-clucking to the communications honchos at Google that they should "beware the backlash." They were getting…

Fortune this week proves that the worm can turn in the mainstream media’s coverage of all stories, even one that for years has proven my predictions wrong. At least 18 months ago I was cluck-clucking to the communications honchos at Google that they should “beware the backlash.” They were getting too much good press, and at some point the media always wakes up and eats its young. But Google enjoyed the longest free ride I’ve seen in recent history – even when those same PR honchos essentially went dark and refused to give anyone much access. The same story kept getting written, again, and again, and again….
This Fortune piece isn’t a hit, but it does rehash the negative bits with at least as much ardor as the positive ones. The piece sets up like this: At Fortune we did some *real* reporting (the implication being that all the stories before were stage managed affairs), and we found out that the company that everyone’s been lauding for the past three years is…complicated, contradictory, and not exactly perfect. Not a rocket science conclusion, but it manages to make the company seem a bit more human. The piece states some very old stuff as fresh (that the company has recently grown arrogant – this is new?), has tidbits of news known only to a very few insiders (that Bill Joy and Google flirted but eventually did not come to terms), and a couple off the record sources who are also investors saying stuff like: “Google has a lot of momentum, but its current position is probably not defensible.” (Yahoo holds 5% of Google…).
The piece is a fine round up of where things stand, but I can’t help feeling a bit empty – so much of the story was stuff we already knew, but had to be in there because of Fortune’s large readership, not all of which could be assumed to be avid followers of all things Google. That’s the problem with mainstream media coverage – it has to speak to everyone. The story lacked an analysis of business models, of the industry, and any deep discussion of the larger phenomenon Google represents. And the negative bits, while something of a first, had a twinge of gossip and/or sour grapes to them. Overall, I’m not sure this piece moved my view of Google one way or another. How about you all?

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Monoculture, Innovation, and the Ivory Tower: The Search Papers

I'm starting to read more academic papers, research presented by various professors and the like (including some folks who are technologists working in the industry). One of the things I find fascinating about the search business is how quickly it's turned from an academic pursuit – with all the…


I’m starting to read more academic papers, research presented by various professors and the like (including some folks who are technologists working in the industry). One of the things I find fascinating about the search business is how quickly it’s turned from an academic pursuit – with all the implications of open, non-commercial sharing of findings – to one driven by clusters of high-powered nerds hitched to a particular corporation’s R&D machine. I’ve been asking around on this idea and found most landlocked geeks agree – Nutch aside, a good percentage of search research has by and large been silo’d – many of the best minds are at Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and a few others. I’ll wager that between the 500 or so top engineers at these corporations, there ain’t a hell of a lot of sharing going on. Robust peer review between bare-knuckle competitors? Prolly not.
But it was not always so. Recall that both Yahoo and Google came out of the Stanford CS department, for the most part. Same for Excite (Joe and Graham). Lycos was midwived by CMU, and out of Berkeley came Inktomi. Anyway, you get the picture. A lot of innovation came out of the publish-and-peer-review culture of the university setting, and many of the folks who drove that culture are suited up, so to speak, in one corporate silo or another.
In any case, before they joined up, many of them wrote wonderful academic papers they shared with all in the name of progress (some still do). And there are still plenty of great academic researchers banging away on the database of intentions, though certainly they don’t benefit from owning their own slice of it like the majors do (many borrow data from the majors and perform analysis on that). So as I work on the book, I’ll be posting reviews of some of the papers I read – the interesting bits, so to speak. I’ll title each entry “The Search Papers: Cute Name Here” for ease of use, or more likely, as a clear caveat that discussion of academic Mumbo-J will follow. The first will be out in the next day or so, a wonderfully predictable little study (found via Gary Price, of course) comparing European and US search patterns from 2001 FAST and Excite (pre-Chapter 11) data. Hope you like it.

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This Month’s Column Is Up

Here's the 2.0 link, but you have to be a subscriber to get past the first page. So here it is as a pdf file (caveat: it will download when you click). I'm still working on putting my Biz 2.0 columns on this site in a more reader-friendly fashion…This month's…

Here’s the 2.0 link, but you have to be a subscriber to get past the first page. So here it is as a pdf file (caveat: it will download when you click). I’m still working on putting my Biz 2.0 columns on this site in a more reader-friendly fashion…This month’s points to the idea (not really new now, but it felt more so six weeks ago when I wrote it) that the geeks behind the best innovations on the net are starting to get excited again over interesting problems that have Very Cool solutions, after two or so years of nuclear winter. Boing Boing points to another columnist who’s recently seen the same trend.

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Wharton States the Obvious, Hopes For The Press

OK, this is just too much. A major, respected school of business issuing what amounts to a puff piece/PR gloss on Google, quoting professors from various branches of the school (legal, marketing, etc), who manage to say just about nothing new. They don't even answer the question raised by…


OK, this is just too much. A major, respected school of business issuing what amounts to a puff piece/PR gloss on Google, quoting professors from various branches of the school (legal, marketing, etc), who manage to say just about nothing new. They don’t even answer the question raised by the article’s headline (“What is Google Worth?”) What on earth are they doing? Why, riding the Google PR machine, of course. “Hey, here’s an idea! Let’s round up all our professors, have them say smart-sounding things about Google, then take credit for regurgitating old ideas!”
Hurray for bandwagonism. I’d wager the folks at Google are a bit embarrassed by this.
This piece at Cnet shows the school has been paying attention to the company for some time. Come on UPenn – if you are going to pick up the discussion, add to it at least, especially as an academic institution.

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