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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Lanier (yes, Jaron) on Software, Biology, Complexity, and …

I am a subscriber to John Brockman's Edge, which is sometimes (well, for me as a rank average mind, more than sometimes) insufferable for its – well, its intellectual preening (it's basically conversations with folks who are scary smart) and its steadfast unwillingness to make itself reasonably approachable (its…

I am a subscriber to John Brockman’s Edge, which is sometimes (well, for me as a rank average mind, more than sometimes) insufferable for its – well, its intellectual preening (it’s basically conversations with folks who are scary smart) and its steadfast unwillingness to make itself reasonably approachable (its last missive, which comes by email, weighed in at 8900 words and seems entirely unedited, for example). But, at times I will plow through the thing, and on a recent occasion, I did just that when along came an interview with none other than Jaron Lanier, Wired staple way back in the age and a constant reminder of how fun and freaky those days were. (more below)

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Carat Strengthens Search Buying Department

Adweek reports Carat Interactive has appointed Ron Belanger vice president of search engine marketing. Excerpt: "In the newly created role, he will guide the strategic vision of the interactive shop's 10-person search-engine marketing practice, which handles paid placement, paid inclusion and search-engine optimization for clients like Hyatt Hotels. He will…

Adweek reports Carat Interactive has appointed Ron Belanger vice president of search engine marketing.
Excerpt: “In the newly created role, he will guide the strategic vision of the interactive shop’s 10-person search-engine marketing practice, which handles paid placement, paid inclusion and search-engine optimization for clients like Hyatt Hotels. He will report to Carat Interactive evp, managing director Alan Osetek and will be based at the Boston headquarters.”
This is one more sign that Search has come of age in the media world. (via MarketingWonk)

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Cato Weighs in on Google-As-Public-Utility Meme

Upshot: they don't like the idea much. Nor do I, but it's not because I hold an unfettered libertarian worldview. I thought the meme of "let's regulate Google like a public utility because it has too much power" was a short lived one, and I'm not sure why Cato brought…

Upshot: they don’t like the idea much. Nor do I, but it’s not because I hold an unfettered libertarian worldview. I thought the meme of “let’s regulate Google like a public utility because it has too much power” was a short lived one, and I’m not sure why Cato brought it up again, but, there you have it. The piece has a lot of links in it and therefore provides a pretty good overview of the “Is Google Too Powerful” concept. Plus the piece even quotes one of my columns, though without direct attribution (it does point to my article hosted and mirrored on some other site…hey…wait a minute! But I guess that’s one way to get my stuff out there beyond the walls of the Time Inc. enclave….) It’s nice to know folks are reading…

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Thoughts on a Day With Yahoo and Feedster

Today I was offline most of the day, as I was working on the book. I met with key folks at Yahoo Search and Scott Rafer , the reasonably new CEO of Feedster (Feedster is a search engine which trolls only RSS feeds. What's an RSS Feed? Read this)….


Today I was offline most of the day, as I was working on the book. I met with key folks at Yahoo Search and Scott Rafer , the reasonably new CEO of Feedster (Feedster is a search engine which trolls only RSS feeds. What’s an RSS Feed? Read this). Lots of discussion about the present, past and future of search. I left Yahoo impressed with where the company is and how the folks I spoke to approached the problem/opportunity of search. Yahoo has the longest history and the richest resource set of any of the current search players, and they certainly have got serious search religion, something that definitely waxed and waned over the past five or so years. Much talk of the lessons of Google, the looming competition with Microsoft, and good discourse on the best ways forward w/r/t search solutions. Ninj Srinivasan, employee #5 and Editor of Yahoo, has been there for nearly 9 years and is still stoked to come to work every day. That says a lot to me. Funny side note: while I was there, 1600 Yahoo employees and various friends went out into the parking lots and broke the world record for simultaneous yodeling. I’m not kidding…

Meanwhile, Scott at Feedster reminded me that PageRank was created back in a time when making links was pretty hard to do, and therefore a scarce resource, so one could reasonably trust that the links were authoritative. But, he supports the idea (as do others, see here and here) that blogs have muddied the waters for PageRank to the point of diminishing returns. I am certainly not one with the chops to judge, but I do wonder how this meme is playing out now that it’s been in the world for a while? It’s not like anyone has come up with anything demonstrably better….
In a related note, Scott mentioned an intriguing development at Feedster that he calls Feedpaper. From his site: “Feedpaper is a dynamic newspaper constructed from RSS feeds around a particular topic.” They are playing around with the idea on the site, for examples, check out this one on the Dean campaign and this one on the recent Longhorn developer conference (Longhorn is the new version of Microsoft’s interface, due sometime later this decade…). Scott’s thesis is that algorithmic search engines do a pretty poor job of aggregating this kind of content for readers interested in a very specific “island” of information. Watch this space, it could get interesting.

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