Tech Review: New Form of Advertising

I am breaking my holiday silence as a few readers have reminded me that I forgot to post a link to a column I wrote up for Technology Review magazine. It's basically a rewrite of my Sell Side Advertising post, but to make the concept a bit more approachable (or perhaps to ruin it) I changed the name to Publisher Driven Advertising. In any case, as always I owe a debt to Ross Mayfield and many others for the ideas contained within. And it's my hope that in 2005 we can take this idea and see where it might run.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:50 PM
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A Look Ahead

Here we are again, the end of the year. Last year I did pretty well with my prognostications, mainly because I chose carefully. This time, I'm feeling a bit more reckless. A year from now, I am sure I'll be scratching my head - what was I thinking? - but then again, that's not such a bad place to be.

So in no particular order, here are some things that I believe have a reasonable chance of occurring in 2005 with regard to the intersection of media, technology, and search.

1. We will have a goat rodeo of sorts in the blogging/micropublishing/RSS world as commercial interests push into what many consider a "pure medium." I've seen this movie before, and it ends OK. But it's important that the debate be full throated, and so far it looks to be shaping up that way. I'm already seeing these forces at work over at Boing Boing, and I am sure they will continue. We'll all work on figuring out ways to stick to our principles and get paid at the same time, however, I expect that things might get more contentious before they get better, and 2005 may be a more fractious year in the blogosphere as we evolve through this process.

2. Along those lines, things will not go as swimmingly as we'd like with regard to "monetization." As the majors get into the space and start throwing around their weight and lucre, some folks will make bad decisions, and others will freeze and make no decisions at all. It will get harder to innovate before it gets easier. We'll all be surprised by the lack of what we consider "progress" in the RSS/Blogging world, and expectations of major publishing revenues will not materialize as quickly as perhaps we think they should. However, we'll in fact be making huge strides in understanding the path forward, it just won't seem like it. By the end of the year, the world will begin to realize that "blogs" are in fact an extraordinarily heterogeneous ecosystem comprised of scores, if not hundreds, of different "types" of sites.

3. There will be two to five major new sites that emerge from "nowhere" to become major cultural influencers along the lines of the political bloggers of 2004. One of them will be sold to a major publisher/aggregator for what seems like a large sum of money, driving the abovementioned #2 and #1.

4. Meanwhile, the long tail will become the talk of the "old line" media world. To capture some of that value, we'll see a slew of deals and new publishing projects from the established brands that seek to capture the idea of community journalism, affiliate commerce sales, and collaborative content creation.

5. Google will do something major with Blogger. I really have no idea what, but it's overdue. Six Apart will grow quickly but face a crisis in its implementation as its core users demand more features that are "unbloglike" like customer databases and robust publishing support tools. This (and other things) may drive Six Apart or one of its competitors into the arms of Yahoo or AOL or even - gasp - Quark or Adobe or Marcomedia.

6. Ask will continue to consolidate traffic by buying smaller search sites.

7. Yahoo and Google will both test systems that combine local merchant inventory information with search, so that merchants can use search as a direct sales channel. By the end of the year, there will be no question that the search companies are in direct competition with the ecommerce companies, but it won't matter - there's room for them all. Paul Ford will continue to get droves of readers to his related, and very prescient, three year old post on how Google takes over the world.

8. Microsoft will lose search share before they gain it back later in the year when the integration of MSN search starts to scale with new versions of Office and IE . Net net, however, MSFT will gain total in total search sessions from last year, and its technology will get much, much better.

9. Firefox will near 15% of total browser share. Firefox faithful will wonder why it's not much much higher. But MSFT will release a very good upgrade of IE, see #8.

10. A third party platform player with major economies of scale (ie eBay or Amazon) will release a search related innovation that blows everyone's mind, and has everyone buzzing about how it redefines what's possible in search.

11. The China question will become a critical issue to the search community. Defining the China question will in itself be a major task of 2005. How do search companies go in without being "evil"? Is the tradeoff worth it?

12. By the end of the year, there will be no question that search is a media business, and that the major players in search are major players in the content business.

13. Something major will finally happen at Tivo. We all hope that it's a sale to Apple, but if it is a sale, it will more likely be to Comcast or DirecTv.

14. All year, Apple will be rumored to launch a video iPod, but it won't - it's still too early. By the end of 2005, we will just be starting to see traction in the video over IP market and its connection to search. Google will introduce Video search at some point in 05, but it will stay in Labs.

15. Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation - the kind that makes us all say - Jeez that was obvious - will occur. At the core of this innovation will be the concept of search. The outlines of such an innovation: it'll be a way for mobile users to gather the unstructured data they leverage every day while talking on the phone and make it useful to their personal web (including email and RSS, in particular). And it will be a business that looks and feels like a Web 2.0 business - leveraging iterative web development practices, open APIs, and innovation in assembly - that makes the leap. (More on this when I start posting again).

16. Perhaps most recklessly...I will finish my book. The reviews will be mixed, as my attempt to satisfy both the exacting audience of Searchbloggers and the more general audience of a major trade hardcover may fall flat. Many will say I tried to do too much, others that I didn't do nearly enough (how's that for airing my deepest fears in public?!). However, I'll be happy with the effort, and the book will do OK, thanks mainly to the support of this community. So, ahead of time, thanks for your support this past year. I learned more from this process than I ever thought possible, and I owe it all to you, who grace my site with your time and input.

17. Lastly, I will be involved in starting a new business in the field of media and technology. It will start very slowly, and I'll screw up as much as I possibly can in the early stages, before imposing it on the rest of the world. Hopefully, you'll all be there to keep me honest as I try to figure out a few ideas I've been simmering for the past year or so.

Unless there's a major story which breaks in the next week or so, I'm signing off for the year, and look forward to resuming posting in 2005. Have a wonderful holiday, and a prosperous, healthy New Year. Oh, and please add your thoughts on 2005 below - I know I missed a lot....

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:22 AM
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A Look Back

One year ago, I made a bunch of predictions. Today I call myself out and see how I did. Tomorrow (or maybe a little later in the week) I'll post some predictions for 2005. That will pretty much round out my posts for 2004 - during the holidays I'm focusing on writing the book. But I couldn't resist this little exercise first.

So...How did I do? Not bad, all told. Possibly because my predictions were facile, but still, we all have our own bars, don't we? I managed to limbo under mine pretty well. So, to the specifics.

My first prediction: "The Web becomes a platform (again)." I think with the buzz around desktop search and the Google OS, the strong performance of the major platform players like Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo, the happy and well attended buzz around Web 2.0, this seems to be coming to fruition.

My second: "Blog ecologies of like-minded folks will garner increasing cultural and social power." With the rise of political bloggers, the rising communities of Scoble, Zawodny, and others, and Time Magazine even considering naming "bloggers" as their person of the year (and the dictionary folks making "blog" their word of the year), I'd say this one was pretty much dead on.

Third prediction: "The Dutch auction/OpenIPO model will be validated." Check.

Fourth: "We'll see a major IPO ($100 million+ sold to public) in search that isn't Google." Well, I sort of got this one, and sort of did not. We had Tom Online in March, and Navteq in October. Whether Navteq is search related is debatable, but certainly search drove its valuation. The company raised $880 million. We also had Marchex, but it didn't make my $100 million in proceeds limit (though it did very well...). Perhaps I could argue that Shopping.com, which raised $137 million, is search related (they sure would not have gone out without search...) Also of note: there was Websidestory, $42 million, and Gurunet, which raised $8 million. I probably missed a couple here...

Fifth prediction: "There will be a "Tylenol Scare" in search...There will be much harrumphing, then everyone will calm down, learn from the incident, and move on. " Yep, that about tells the Gmail story.

Sixth: "Once a month, a new search player will be crowned in the press as 'the next Google.'" This one was way too easy to predict. More like once a week...the examples are too profuse to mention...

Seventh: "Second generation blog/RSS aggregation sites will come close to combining directory functions with LinkedIn- and recommendation-engine-like features - think Amazon+Yahoo for the blogosphere...." Yup. Bloglines, Rojo and others did just that.

Eighth: " ...at about the same time Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and Google will build or buy second-generation blog/RSS aggregation sites." Well, I was mostly wrong here. But Yahoo is sure doing some interesting things with RSS, and MSN did introduce MSN Spaces and got very serious about blogging, among other things.

Ninth: "The world will realize the importance of our digital artifacts, and takes further steps to to preserve them." I think Google Print is a step towards this (once we realize that books are worth saving, we might also realize that websites are as well), and the Internet Archive did a world of good this year, but we're still in the digital dark ages, for the most part. This was wishful thinking on my part.

Tenth: "Cable companies will control more than 75% of the PVR market, but a backlash/new TiVo-like device (possibly from Apple) will develop by the end of the year." This is on its way to becoming true, but the cable companies have been slower than I expected in rolling out PVR services. Meantime, there was a new launch, Akimbo, but alas, no Apple moves, yet.

Eleventh: "Microsoft will have a surprise hit product that has nothing to do with Office or Longhorn, causing a minor fire drill in Redmond." I think Halo 2 qualifies as a major hit that has nothing to do with Office or Longhorn...

And finally: "I'll finish my book, try to stop writing this blog, but find it impossible to do so. Meanwhile, a deeply cool, once-in-a-decade-magazine-I wish-I-had-thought-of will launch." Well, I'm close to finishing, but I'd say I missed this one by two or three chapters. I sure didn't stop blogging, and as far as the magazine launch - I'm sort of happy to report, I was wrong. There were plenty of new magazines, but none that made me wish for my old job back. As for cool new magazines that look promising but are not in my personal sweet spot, I was really pleased to see the launch of Chow, from former TIS editor Jane Goldman, and Breathe, from pals Lisa Haines and Deanna Brown. But most of the new magazines were market-driven pap. As for that deeply cool new magazine which I wished I thought of, I've got my money on Make, launching early next year. At least I'm involved in a small way!

Well, 2005 promises to be a very interesting year. Happy Holidays, everyone!

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:55 PM
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"We'll figure out how to monetize it later"

That's a quote in today's USA Today from Lars Perkins, product manager for Picasa, Google's recently acquired photo software. It's a sentiment that rests deep in Google DNA - make the product first, figure out the business case later. It worked for the original Google service, and it's clearly guiding Print, Orkut, Froogle, and News (though some of those of course are supported by advertising). I don't have the answer to this question, but it's worth raising - how long can this approach to the world stand? It's certainly a wonderful luxury to have - make a useful product, then figure out if/how it might make money. it reminds me of my preferred approach to publishing - make great editorial, then figure out how to sell it later. The only difference - with editorial, there was always a model to fall back on - advertising and subscription. As I've pointed out before, I'm not so sure that advertising alone can foot the bill for all of Google's innovations.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:13 PM
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Yahoo Releases Update to Index

Last year Google released a major update to its index right before Christmas, and all hell broke loose. This year Yahoo did the same, but the reaction has been more muted - even positive, in some cases. It's always hard to draw conclusions from index updates, but this one seems to be moving a lot of SEO links around the SERPs...

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:00 PM
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The End of Friends

Joi Ito has reached the limit of Orkut friendship - the service cut him off at 1000.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:52 PM
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Pell, Geico, and Paid Search

Dave Pell recounts his excursion into buying AdWords based on the Geico keywords, and summarizes some new marketing realties:

My experience does clearly point to the fact that we have opened up a whole new marketing frontier that will require ad buyers and small businesses to be a lot more creative with their marketing plans. It's not as simple as coming up with the most obvious search terms. As the market grows, those will become prohibitively expensive for most buyers. Ad buyers will need to predict what their potential buyers might be interested in and then try to get in front of them as they're on the way to finding it. If you want to get in front of a few thousand potential orthodontics patients, you might have to figure out something more creative than the words teeth and braces. And in many cases, your marketing plan may only last for a few days (or even a few hours) at which time you'll need to add new search terms to the mix.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:50 PM
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Google Desktop Security: Welcome to the Software Biz

As I noted when GDS first came out, once you start providing serious PC-based software and integrate it with an internet service, you can become a target of hackers. The Times today writes about the security flaw initially discovered by Rice researchers. Google has already posted an updated version of GDS.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:35 PM
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Cindy - An Appreciation

Now that the news is out that Cindy McCaffrey is leaving Google, I can post an appreciation. I first met Cindy when I was a cub reporter for MacWeek in 1987. She handled PR for a portion of Apple, and it was my job to try to get anything I could on the company, no matter what. It was Cindy who would call me, exasperated, when I acquired a pre-release version of Apple's new Mac IIci and published a photo of its motherboard on the front page.

And it was Cindy who campaigned internally on my behalf when I came up with the idea, 15 years later, of writing a book that featured search as its subject and Google as a major narrative actor. With Cindy at the helm of communications and marketing, Google has enjoyed perhaps the most unprecedented run of good press in modern corporate history. (Cindy also sidestepped the marketing excesses of the bubble era, a decision that was not easy to take in 1999-2000). She's been at Google since the middle of 1999, and certainly deserves the break she plans to take (I believe sailing for a few weeks with her husband is the first item on her agenda). She told me recently that she's looking forward to reconnecting with family, friends, and "cooking her own dinners." I wish her well, and expect it won't be long before we hear from her again. She's too good - and too restless - to retire forever.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:18 PM
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Comment Spam and Search

Anyone with a blog has come across the bane of comment spam, recently it's gotten to near epidemic proportions for folks who use Moveable Type, as I do (I think this is because MT users tend to have high PageRank sites, but that's just a guess).

Why do comment spammers do what they do? Simple: for the ranking juice. A spammer's link inserted into the comment field confers this site's authority, such that it is, to the spammer's target site. Jeremy Zawodny, who is working with the Search team over at Yahoo, posts an interesting commentary on this problem, and suggests a solution.

If you assume the following:

1. 80% of blogs are hosted by or produced on one of the more popular blogging platforms
2. 80% of people don't significantly tweak the default templates available in their blogging software
3. those people are the least likely to be actively fighting spam and, as a result, have more spam than the 20% of blogs where the owner is more defensive

Then a partial solution is fairly clear. I've heard and seen others discuss it over the past few months. The search engines needs to be smarter about reading and indexing content. ...the software needs to be able to recognize the difference between links produced by the blog owner(s) and those contributed by readers and spambots. Once you can identify the difference between those two types of links, you simply stop using the second type of link when calculating rank. Sure, you can still count them for the purpose of providing link counts--just donn't factor them into the ranking.

Jeremy's suggestion has elicited a lot of commentary. As one of the 20% who actively fight comment spam, I'm hoping that some kind of solution is in the works. But I'm not sure this is it - often I appreciate the links that are left in my comment fields, and I wouldn't want to discourage anyone who is well intentioned from continuing the practice. On the other hand, comment spam is a major problem, and it might be worth losing a bit of juice to save the ecosystem from the parasites.

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:04 PM
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WayBack Machine

Guess what year I'm writing about (for the book) today...

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:27 PM
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Froogle's Product Reviews

As many have noted, Froogle has begun to aggregate snippets of product reviews from the web at large. This marks the Google News-ification of Froogle. When will the service jump the shark and start making money on vigs from sales? Or will it? Will publishers like Cnet revolt? Wait, here's Cnet coverage...

The service, which is similar to the company's aggregated site for news around the Web, highlights Google's ambition to bring more content to its own site with the use of its "spidering" technology.

Huh. "Bring more content." That's an interesting way to put it. Indeed.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:39 AM
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Job Search, Indeed

Indeed.com is a new service which scrapes jobs from scores of services and then wraps a familiar interface around the entire thing - a search interface. I like the ability to refine searches and the ability to search by region. It's fun to play around with. Needs to deal with the duplication issue, as this search for "blogger" shows, but it supports RSS and you can sort by date. Neat. The site's founders have a (nascent) blog as well.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:14 AM
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On Desktop Search

And, by the way, I got pinged by the folks at Lycos, who want to remind us all that they were in this game really early....with a HotBot desktop search tool.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:57 PM
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Get Yer Traffic Reports Here...

Yahoo's been busy, today it also announced that it is overlaying traffic data on top of its Maps product. The picture shows get from my house to Yahoo, with traffic highlights.

This is a capability that John Hanke showed with Keyhole at Web 2.0, so I expect we'll see something similar from Google shortly...Release in extended entry.

YAHOO! BECOMES FIRST ONLINE MAPS PROVIDER TO OFFER
REAL-TIME TRAFFIC SOLUTION

Sunnyvale, Calif. – December 16, 2004 – Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, today announced the launch of a service that lets consumers view live local traffic information on their online maps and driving directions. Yahoo! is the first online site to provide speed conditions and dynamic traffic information nationwide.

The new mapping feature will initially be integrated in Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Local, and Yahoo! Maps — and is available to consumers at http://maps.yahoo.com. In the coming months, Yahoo! will continue to develop additional enhancements that increase the functionality and power of its mapping and traffic technology to deliver on its vision of delivering the best local search experience online.

Online map usage has grown 60 percent during the last two years (Nielsen NetRatings, October 2004), and products are becoming more advanced with technology like Yahoo!’s innovative SmartView service. In line with this increase in consumer demand online, the new Yahoo! traffic solution provides users with the best way to reach their destinations by incorporating reliable information for over 70 metropolitan areas in the U.S.

With this new mapping service, consumers can now

• Customize their Yahoo! Maps display and layer traffic information on top of driving directions or maps
• Scroll over the traffic icons - an extension of Yahoo!’s SmartView technology - to find out the road conditions on their journey ahead including the time the incident occurred and the estimated time that it will be resolved
• Find traffic accident reports and road construction information in over 70 metropolitan areas
• Find real-time driving speed data in over 20 top metropolitan areas
• Pan and zoom to find the traffic information most relevant to them
• Provide the best way to reach their destinations by incorporating reliable information from embedded road sensors, traffic cameras, police scanners/reports, and traffic helicopters.

For example, if a consumer uses Yahoo! Local to search for a restaurant, he/she can now click on the map or driving directions to see the traffic conditions and determine how long it will take to reach the destination. Or, if a consumer types the phrase Atlanta Traffic into Yahoo! Search, he/she will receive a link on top of the page that would enable him/her to see a real-time map of the traffic conditions in Atlanta.

“Yahoo! continues to improve our users’ online experiences by delivering new and innovative local services,” said Paul Levine, general manager of Yahoo!’s Local Services. “We’re pleased to be the first major maping site to offer a robust, nationwide traffic service. This is an exciting extension of our local strategy and another example of how we can leverage Yahoo!’s content and technology to create a truly differentiated search experience.”

As an extension of Yahoo!’s SmartView product, this real-time traffic service brings content into a mapping interface to offer users the ability to visualize traffic information in a whole new way. With current integration with Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Local, this mapping product will offer deeper integration across the network in the coming months.

About Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is a leading provider of comprehensive online products and services to consumers and businesses worldwide. Yahoo! is the No. 1 Internet brand globally and the most trafficked Internet destination worldwide. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yahoo!'s global network includes 25 world properties and is available in 13 languages.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:19 PM
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Yahoo Video Search, Second Day

So word is out on Yahoo's video search, many have noted its similarity to previous incarnations from Yahoo acquisitions alltheweb and AltaVista. A post on Yahoo's Search Blog clarifies that those sites now have Yahoo's video search improvements rolled in, so the new product is in fact an improved version. The original post on the video beta release is here.

What I find interesting about this new product is the extensions Yahoo is proposing for RSS - "Media RSS." With it, Yahoo is attempting to address a major problem with indexing video - that of metadata, or more directly, the lack thereof. From Jeremy's post:

----

As Marc Canter has noticed, we could all benefit from a bit more metadata to go with this growing pool of media. Who published this video? What formats are available? How is it licensed?

From our point of view, it means we can build a much better video search. You might want to filter results based on some of that metadata (title, actor, file format, etc). But it also opens up so many more doors. For example, your news aggregator might use your preferences to figure out which videos to download: Windows Media or Quicktime? High bandwidth or low? Heck, we can see entirely new rich media aggregators and tools being built--something like the popular iPodder currently used for podcasting. And when they are, this metadata becomes all the more important.

To get this started, we're suggesting an optional set of metadata extensions that we've been calling "Media RSS" (yes, we're so creative with names). They're aimed at publishers who'd like to provide a rich set of metadata about the media being published. Our video search system will also support these Media RSS extensions in addition to video enclosures (see the FAQ and the draft spec).
-----

Yahoo is using its power as a major distribution player to feed what it hopes will be a major play in video distribution. It may not seem like a big deal now, but as the web increasingly becomes a native environment for video, it will may well prove to be one of the most forward looking things the company has done this year. And by the way, it's always fun to see what the top search is for "dancing monkey." Hey, that looks like Steve Ballmer....

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:06 PM
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Search Paper Fun: Most Cited

I sent a query to Lee Giles, the guru at Penn State behind CiteSeer (with Steve Lawrence, who is now at Google) asking him which search-related papers are the most cited. I was struck by the near parity between Page and Brin's original paper on Google and Jon Kleinberg's paper on Hubs and Authorities. Giles did a bit of fiddling with Google Scholar and responded:

For web related work these are well cited in the Google Scholar using the query “web”:

 PDF] The Semantic Web
T Berners-Lee, J Hendler, O Lassila - View as HTML - Cited by 1347
... May 17, 2001. The Semantic Web. A new form of Web content that is meaningful to
computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities. ... Web: A Research Agenda. ...
Scientific American, 2001 - www-personal.si.umich.edu

 [PDF] The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine
S Brin, L Page - View as HTML - Cited by 1087
Abstract In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search
engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google ...
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 1998 - kulturinformatik.uni-lueneburg.de - firstrate.co.nz - net.cs.pku.edu.cn - scalab.uc3m.es - all 69 versions   

However, this one can’t be ignored:

 [PDF] Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment
J Kleinberg… - Cited by 1059
Abstract. The network structure of a hyperlinked environment can be a rich
source of information about the content of the environment, provided we ...
Journal of the ACM, 1999 - portal.acm.org - nan.dhs.org - cs.cmu.edu - mathe.tu-freiberg.de - all 73 versions

 This book is the first to discuss the web in any detail:

 [PS] Modern Information Retrieval
R Baeza-Yates, B Ribeiro-Neto, R Baeza-Yates - View as HTML - Cited by 1198
Page 1. Modern Information Retrieval. Ricardo Baeza-Yates. Berthier Ribeiro-Neto.
ACM Press New York. ... 1.1.2 Information Retrieval at the Center of the Stage . . ...
Addision Wesley, 1999 - dcc.ufmg.br - sunsite.dcc.uchile.cl - sims.berkeley.edu - portal.acm.org - all 7 versions »

All worthy reads!

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:29 PM
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Yahoo Video Search

Sigh. Again, I find myself in this odd space. I'm under embargo on this information (Yahoo briefed me and others), but a reader just sent me this link out of the blue (my readers are so damn dialed in, first Google Library, now this...). So you guys go look for yourselves, please comment here as to what you think, and I'll write about this on Thursday, as I have holiday stuff to do tonight and can't write it up now. Yahoo Video Search.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:14 PM
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Google Wins Key Portion of Geico Case

Reuters just came out with this:

ALEXANDRIA (Reuters) - A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a key element of insurer GEICO's trademark infringement case against online search engine Google Inc (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) .

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that there was not enough evidence of trademark violation to bar Google from displaying rival insurers when computer users search the word "GEICO."

From the AP:

Geico claimed that Google's AdWords program, which displays the rival ads under a "Sponsored Links" heading next to a user's search results, causes confusion for consumers and illegally exploits Geico's investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in its brand.

"There is no evidence that that activity alone causes confusion, " Brinkema said, in granting Google's motion for summary judgment on that issue.

But Brinkema said the case would continue to move forward on one remaining issue, whether ads that pop up and actually use Geico in their text violate trademark law.

More as this develops...

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:52 AM
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A Blitzkrieg of Zeitgiestian Data

AOL's year end list, Lycos' year end list, Yahoo's Holiday shopping list....

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:34 AM
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Rosenberg Chimes In

Echoing other conversations I've seen around the web (wait for 12/14 to post)....Scott pings the Big Concept that while the folks building Google now are clearly well intentioned, we are creating an asset in Google together that someday may be out of our collective control. In Salon's blog, Scott Rosenberg comments:

But Google is a public company. The people leading it today will not be leading it forever. It's not inconceivable that in some future downturn Google will find itself under pressure to "monetize" its trove of books more ruthlessly.

Today's Google represents an extremely benign face of capitalism, and it may be that the only way to get a project of this magnitude done efficiently is in the private sector. But capitalism has its own dynamic, and ad-supported businesses tend to move in one direction -- towards more and more aggressive advertising.

Since we are, after all, talking about digitizing the entire body of published human knowledge, I can't help thinking that a public-sector effort -- whether government-backed or non-profit or both -- is more likely to serve the long-term public good. I know that's an unfashionable position in this market-driven era. It's also an unrealistic one given the current U.S. government's priorities.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:29 AM
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Ferguson on Google: Platform? Yes. Single Platform? No.

Charles Ferguson writes a lengthy and clearly considered piece on Google for Tech Review, focusing on the Microsoft angle and concluding that the only way Google can truly "win" is by controlling a new architecture of computing through the time honored approach of proprietary APIs. Ferguson argues that the search wars are about to enter a major battle for control of standards which simplify the increasingly heterogeneous world of search, and in such a battle, Microsoft is far better suited.

I enjoyed reading this piece, and I am sure I will read it again and again, to more fully consider its argument. But I find myself disagreeing with the premise - why, in this world of the web, do we need to be bound by this winner takes all approach to the world? It works in a resource constrained world of homogenous PCs - once a consumer has purchased his Windows box, he's not going to easily purchase an emerging competitor - but somehow, it really doesnt' strike me as the right metaphor for a Web 2.0 world. I do agree that Google would be well served to make its service more of a platform, and that APIs are the way to go. But I'd really be interested in what Tim O'Reilly has to say about this piece, or Tim Bray, or any number of other folks. I'll keep my eye out...meanwhile, do read the piece. It's a worthy provocation.

Other POVs on this piece: TechDirt, Linden, SEW, Silicon Beat

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:36 PM
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Print Implications: Google As Builder

Some folks have been calling me and together we've been pondering the implications of the Google Print announcement. And one drop dead obvious thing dawned on me during the conversations.

This is so obvious as to be almost embarrassing to restate, but this program marks a major departure in Google's overall approach to search. After all, what has been the presumptive model till now? If it's on the web and publicly available, it's in the index. That's why we called it web search, after all. But Gary Price and Chris Sherman, among many others, have reminded us how vast and darkly lit the invisible web is - all that information trapped in the amber of password-protected databases, or crumbling film libraries, or ....books.

Now other companies have taken significant steps toward illuminating these dark corners of the world's knowledge web - Yahoo with its CAP program, Amazon with A9 and Search Inside the Book. And Google has long claimed that it's mission was to go beyond the web and crawl the world's information, wherever it lay.

But Google was, until now, the world's purest web search engine. What, I wonder, are the implications of tens of millions of book pages entering this once pure space? (Google has announced that the results will be included in the index, not separated out in a vertical book search engine.)

Why am I on about this? Well, it comes down to the essence of what - so far - has made Google Google: the ranking paradigm. Here's a sketch from the book I am working on:

In essence, academic publishing is a flawed but useful system of peer review incorporating ranking, citation, and annotation as core concepts. Fair enough. So what?

Well, in short, it was Tim Berners Lee’s attempt to address the drawbacks of this system (through network technology and hypertext) that led to his creation of the World Wide Web (4), and it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s attempts to make Berners Lee’s World Wide Web better that led to Google.

Which brings us back to Page, and his original research work focusing on backlinks. He reasoned that the entire web was loosely based on the premise of citation and annotation – after all, what was a link but a citation, and what was the text describing that link but annotation?

The point I'm making is this: Google was born of, by, and in the web, as an extremely clever algorithm which noticed the relationships between links, and exploited those relationships to create a ranking system which brought order and relevance to the web. Google's job was not to build the web, its job was to organize it and make it accessible to us.

But all this new Print material, well, it's never been on the web before. It's Google who is actively bringing it to us. How, therefore, does Google rank it, make it visible, surface it, and..importantly...monetize it? If a philanthropist were to drop the entire contents of the Library of Congress onto the web, Google would ultimately index it, and as folks linked to the content, that content would rise and fall as a natural extension of everything else on the web. But in this case, Google itself is adding content to the web, and is itself surfacing the content based on keywords we enter. This is a new role - one of active creator, rather than passive indexer.

This means, in short, that Google is making editorial decisions about how to surface this new content, decisions it can't claim are based on the founding principle of its mission - PageRank. Sure, there are straightforward keyword matching techniques, and over time the web will deep link those book pages - each page in Print has a unique URL. But really, the magic of what made Google Google - the existing link structure of the web - is entirely non-existent with these newly surfaced print pages. By extension, the same will be true for any new media brought into the index - be it movies, music, radio, television, photos, you name it. That's why I'm so interested in what role Google will play in monetizing this content (see here and here) and why I am so fascinated with this media v. technology angle.

I guess the net net of all this is that this move by Google, which I think is monumental, marks a shift in who the company is in the world. It's no longer simply an indexer of the world's knowledge web. Google Print is a clear declaration that it's a builder of it as well.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:23 PM
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Ask Jeeves: Do We Need Another Desktop Search?

Yes, we do, says Andy Beal. This one's pretty good, according to early reviews. Release in extended entry.

Ask Jeeves Introduces Desktop Search Application
Emeryville, CA, December 15, 2004 - Ask Jeeves®, Inc. (Nasdaq: ASKJ), a
leading provider of information retrieval brands, today introduced a beta
desktop search application. Fast, relevant, and flexible, Ask Jeeves Desktop
Search(tm) makes it easy for people to find information on their computers
or the Internet. The product is available free for download at
http://download.ask.com/desktop.
Ask Jeeves Desktop Search helps people overcome the challenges of
information overload by enabling them to quickly and easily search the
hundreds, even thousands of files, word-processing documents, presentations,
spreadsheets, photos, music and video files, applications and email messages
on their computers.
"Ask Jeeves Desktop Search extends our world-class technologies and
user-centric approach to search beyond the Web, to the information located
on people's computers," said Jim Lanzone, senior vice president of search
properties at Ask Jeeves. "Ask Jeeves Desktop Search will complement our
recently-introduced MyJeeves personal search service and is an important
step in our personalization strategy. We look forward to receiving feedback
on the beta release, as we continue to develop the product in line with
people's needs."
Product highlights include:
- Fresh, Full-Text Index: Upon installation of the small (750K) application,
Ask Jeeves Desktop Search creates an index of the information stored on a
person's computer. This process enables users to search by file name, as
well as by file content. The application currently supports a wide range of
file types, including Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint),
simple text files, Microsoft Outlook email messages, and image, music, and
video files. Ask Jeeves Desktop Search constantly monitors the computer
(with minimal impact on system resources) for new and deleted files and
email messages to ensure the index is always kept up to date.
- Fast, Flexible Search: Like searching the Internet, users simply type key
words into a search box to let Ask Jeeves Desktop Search scour their
computer for matching results. Users can narrow their searches by selecting
categories like Office Documents, Music, Pictures, MyJeeves, News and
others, or they can sort results by a variety of parameters. Meanwhile,
controls are also provided for users to define how much of their computers
they want Ask Jeeves Desktop Search to index, as well as the speed (and thus
the amount of bandwidth devoted) with which they want it indexed.
- User-Centric Design: Ask Jeeves Desktop Search is very simple to learn and
use. The program takes search beyond the paradigm of 10 blue links and
returns results in a two-panel interface where previews are displayed for
easy review. (This is especially useful for browsing photos and email
messages.) Users will also find a search box conveniently added to common
Windows dialog boxes, such as Insert Attachment or File/Open, where the
process of finding files is frequently required.
Ask Jeeves expects to add new functionality prior to the formal launch of
the product in 2005. Some of these features include expanded support for
Outlook, integration of desktop and Web search results, and PDF support. A
Feedback menu is provided directly on the application interface to make it
easy for users to submit comments and requests for new features.
Ask Jeeves Desktop Search works with Windows 2000 or XP, Office 2000 or
higher, and Outlook 2003. The program requires a minimum of a Pentium III
computer running at 400MHz with 128 MB RAM (1 GHz and 256 MB RAM
recommended).
About Ask Jeeves, Inc.
Ask Jeeves, Inc. provides consumers and advertisers with information
retrieval products across a diverse portfolio of Web sites, portals and
desktop search applications. Ask Jeeves' search and search-based portal
brands include: Ask Jeeves (Ask.com and Ask.co.uk); Ask Jeeves Japan
(Ask.jp, a joint venture); Ask Jeeves for Kids (AJKids.com); Excite
(excite.com); iWon (iwon.com); My Search (mysearch.com); My Way (myway.com);
My Web Search (mywebsearch.com) and Teoma (teoma.com). Ask Jeeves also owns
the search technology Teoma, proprietary natural language processing
technology, as well as portal and ad serving technologies. In addition to
powering several of the Ask Jeeves brands, the Company syndicates its
technologies to help companies increase revenue through powerful search. Ask
Jeeves' advertising division, AJinteractive, provides advertisers with
targeted tools to reach a broad base of valuable customers. Ask Jeeves, Inc.
is headquartered in Emeryville, California, with offices throughout the
United States, as well as in London, England and Dublin, Ireland. For more
information, visit http://www.Ask.com <http://www.ask.com/> or call
510-985-7400.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:26 PM
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Google Library: Talk About a Long Tail...

Mr. Page said yesterday that the project traced to the roots of Google, which he and Mr. Brin founded in 1998 after taking a leave from a graduate computer science program at Stanford where they worked on a "digital libraries" project. "What we first discussed at Stanford is now becoming practical," Mr. Page said.

The details: Google is working with Stanford, the University of Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, and the New York Public Library to make millions of books available in its index. For now the project is in pilot phase, but there are hopes and expectations this will go big in the next few years. A source told me the project was originally named Google Library, but for now it will exist under the Google Print moniker. An example of Google Print is here. The screenshot at left is what I was provided by Google for today's launch.

The implications here are significant. First, the idea that the world's knowledge, as held through books and libraries, is opening up to all via a web browser cannot be understated. It's one thing to have the an original copy of The Origin of Species on the shelves, where students and interested parties have to travel to find it. It's another to have it available to everyone via a search index and your web browser. Second, this move clearly puts Google in the category of innovator when it comes to adding information to their index. But it also raises significant business model questions, one that are both exciting and unanswered. I brought them up in an earlier post:

A very interesting case will be Google Print. As that program expands, and it's rumored that it will, dramatically, a number of questions arise. How will Google monetize out-of-copyright books? If it indeed does bring tens of thousands of out-of-print books onto the web and into its index, will it allow others to access and index that new treasure trove, or will it act more like a traditional media company, which would "own" that resource for itself? How will it choose what it brings into the index - those that might sell? Those that somehow are the most "in demand" by some measurable standard? With regard to books that are in print, will it limit itself to being soley an organizational tool supported by AdWords, or will it start to take a vig for books that are sold via the Google Print service (in fact, maybe it does already and I'm simply unaware of it - any publishers out there, let me know!)? And will the print model scale to television and movies or music?

Google Print already monetizes a selection of in-copyright books via advertising, and shares some of those revenues with the publishers. But it's a very short distance between that and, say, an affiliate link to Amazon or any other booksellers for a cut of an in copyright sale. It's also a very short route to the on demand publishing of an out of print and out of copyright book with a company that is set up to do such a deal, and I am aware of at least one that is about to launch that will provide just such a service. Of course, if you want an ebook, that can be arranged as well. For out of copyright books, the tail is extraordinarily long, and quite possibly very very profitable. In other words, this could well be a step toward diversifying Google's revenue streams away from advertising and into direct sales and/or subscriptions - ie, the content business. As one source who is familiar with the industry tells me, Google is not doing this only out of the kindness of its heart - there is a lot of money to be made in selling books, in particular books with no copyright.

I did ask Adam Smith, a manager of the Print program at Google, how Google will decide which books get scanned first. He said quite forthrightly that he did not have a good answer for me on that yet. I've heard from others that for now it's pretty random, but the question is important. As to whether Google will allow anyone else to index the books they scan, I am pretty sure the answer is no. After all, Amazon is also scanning books, and I am sure they aren't letting others in on their hard work. I'll repost if that turns out to be inaccurate. And of course there are other efforts, including Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. But now, we have a commercial giant who has both a mission-based (organize the world's information and make it accessible) as well as a commercially viable reason to bring this information to the world. As David Hayes, a copyright lawyer at Fenwick who worked on this deal and who I've known from my own work with his firm put it: "This will create a revolutionary new information location tool that should be a benefit to the whole world.” I for one applaud the effort - it's an example of enlightened capitalism, and I hope it thrives.

More here and here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:55 PM
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Levy: Gates On the Search Rampage

Bill Gates has a Google thing. When I asked him about the search competition last summer, he turned on the sarcasm. "We'll never be as cool as them. Every conference you go to, there they are dressed in black, and no one is cooler!" Clearly Gates's dander was up, not only because the Google upstarts were eating his lunch, but they were press darlings as well. Behind the rant was a taunting subtext: watch me. Bill, you see, had been busy figuring how to get his lunch back.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:38 PM
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Google To Launch Major Pilot Program with Harvard, Stanford, U Mich, Others

I am under embargo* on the details of this until later tonight, but this just came to me without me asking from a very reliable source. To honor the embargo, I will reserve my analysis and thoughts for later, and simply reprint the text of a note which was sent to certain parties at Harvard today. It describes what has been called (by the NYT) "Project Ocean" - a pilot project to scan and make searchable the contents of some of the world's most prestigious libraries. I went into some of the issues this raises toward the bottom of this recent post (where I talk about Google Print). For the entire text of the email, click on the extended entry. Snippets:

As all of us know, Harvard's is the world's
preeminent university library. Its holdings of over 15 million volumes
are the result of nearly four centuries of thoughtful and comprehensive
collecting. While those holdings are of primary importance to Harvard
students and faculty, we have, for several years, been considering ways
to make the collections more useful and accessible to scholars around
the world....

Harvard University is embarking on a collaboration with Google that could
harness Google's search technology to provide to both the Harvard community and
the larger public a revolutionary new information location tool to find
materials available in libraries. In the coming months, Google will collaborate
with Harvard's libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of
the 15 million volumes held in the University's extensive library system.
Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in
the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects
with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public
Library. As of 9 am on December 14, an FAQ detailing the Harvard pilot program
with Google will be available at http://hul.harvard.edu....

If the pilot is deemed successful, Harvard will explore a long-term program with Google through
which the vast majority of the University's library books would be digitized and
included in Google's searchable database. Google will bear the direct costs of
digitization in the pilot project....

* To be clear, my rules on embargos are this: I promise not to report anything I've been told by the organization that requests the embargo until the embargo time, but if similar information comes to me through third party sources, I will report that information. I will not, however, use that third party information as an excuse to disclose any information still under embargo.

December 13, 2004

Dear Colleague,

I am writing today with news of an exciting new project within the
Harvard libraries. As all of us know, Harvard's is the world's
preeminent university library. Its holdings of over 15 million volumes
are the result of nearly four centuries of thoughtful and comprehensive
collecting. While those holdings are of primary importance to Harvard
students and faculty, we have, for several years, been considering ways
to make the collections more useful and accessible to scholars around
the world. Now we are about to begin a project that can further that
global goal-and, at the same time, can greatly enhance access to
Harvard's vast library resources for our students and faculty.

We have agreed to a pilot project that will result in the digitization
of a substantial number of volumes from the Harvard libraries. The
pilot will give the University a great deal of important data on a
possible future large-scale digitization program for most of the books
in the Harvard collections. The pilot is a small but extremely
significant first step that can ultimately provide both the Harvard
community and the larger public with a revolutionary new information
location tool to find materials available in libraries.

The pilot project will be done in collaboration with Google. The
project will link Harvard's library collections with Google's resources
and its cutting-edge technology. The pilot project, which will be
announced officially tomorrow, is the result of more than a year of
careful consultation at many levels of the University. We could not
have achieved a meaningful pilot project without the efforts of the
Harvard Corporation; the President, Provost, Chief Information Officer,
and Office of General Counsel; the University Library Council; and
senior managers within the College Library and the University Library.

A full description of the pilot program follows here, with further
materials available on the Harvard home page tomorrow.

With best regards,

Sidney Verba
Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library

Project Description:
Harvard's Pilot Project with Google

Harvard University is embarking on a collaboration with Google that could
harness Google's search technology to provide to both the Harvard community and
the larger public a revolutionary new information location tool to find
materials available in libraries. In the coming months, Google will collaborate
with Harvard's libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of
the 15 million volumes held in the University's extensive library system.
Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in
the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects
with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public
Library. As of 9 am on December 14, an FAQ detailing the Harvard pilot program
with Google will be available at http://hul.harvard.edu.

The Harvard pilot will provide the information and experience on which the
University can base a decision to launch a large-scale digitization program.
Any such decision will reflect the fact that Harvard's library holdings are
among the University's core assets, that the magnitude of those holdings is
unique among university libraries anywhere in the world, and that the
stewardship of these holdings is of paramount importance. If the pilot is
deemed successful, Harvard will explore a long-term program with Google through
which the vast majority of the University's library books would be digitized and
included in Google's searchable database. Google will bear the direct costs of
digitization in the pilot project.

By combining the skills and library collections of Harvard University with the
innovative search skills and capacity of Google, a long-term program has the
potential to create an important public
good. According to Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, "Harvard has the
greatest university library in the world. If this experiment is successful, we
have the potential to provide the world's greatest system for dissemination as
well."

In addition, there would be special benefits to the Harvard community.
Plans call for the eventual development of a link allowing Google users
at Harvard to connect directly to the online HOLLIS (Harvard Online
Library Information System) catalog (http://holliscatalog.harvard.edu)
for information on the location and availability at Harvard of works
identified through a Google search. This would merge the search
capacity of the Internet with the deep research collections at Harvard
into one seamless resource-a development especially important for
undergraduates who often see the library and the Internet as
alternative and perhaps rival sources of information.

Eventually, Harvard users would benefit from far better access to the 5
million books located at the Harvard Depository (HD). If the University
undertakes the long-term program, Harvard users would gain online
access to the full text of out-of-copyright books stored at HD. For
books still in copyright, Harvard users could gain the ability to
search for small snippets of text and, possibly, to view tables of
contents. In short, the Harvard student or faculty member would gain
some of the advantages of browsing that remote storage of books at HD
cannot currently provide.

According to Sidney Verba, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and
Director of the University Library, "The possibility of a large-scale
digitization of Harvard's library books does not in any way diminish
the University's commitment to the collection and preservation of books
as physical objects. The digital copy will not be a substitute for the
books themselves. We will continue actively to acquire materials in all
formats and we will continue to conserve them. In fact, as part of the
pilot we are developing criteria for identifying books that are too
fragile for digitizing and for selecting them out of the project.

"It is clear," Verba continued, "that the new century presents
unparalleled challenges and opportunities to Harvard's libraries. Our
pilot program with Google can prove to be a vital and revealing first
step in a lengthy and rewarding process that will benefit generations
of scholars and others."

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:20 PM
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The Market At Work...

Look what comes up as an AdWord when you type in GOOG, which is the stock ticker for Google. Clearly, some enterprising real estate agent thinks the folks at Google are checking their net worth and thinking about buying a house near work....

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:55 PM
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It's Only Me, Dave Pell

This is a good stunt. Playing off the traffic from the Geico case, Dave Pell bought the Gieco keyword on Google to drum up some traffic for his blog. Wonder how it'll work?

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:05 PM
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MSFT Announces Desktop Search, Ask Will Make It a Trifecta

I'm writing and focused on that, but MSFT announced their toolbar/desktop search today. Ask's is due tomorrow. Yahoo's was last week. Crikes!

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:51 AM
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Google TM Trial Begins Today

Here's MediaPost's curtain raiser. For some reason I thought this would settle, but there you have it. For those (three) of you who share my fascination with trademark issues...

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:55 AM
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PubSub InfoP*rn

Pubsub shows the most linked to sites, and the gainers and losers. I'm proud to see Boing Boing way up there!

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:33 AM
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TiVo It

I am the proud owner of two Tivos. But this news has me upset: the NYT notes that Tivo is sending bigfoot letters to media organizations telling them how to use the trademarked term "Tivo" in a sentence. In particular, they don't like folks using "Tivo" as a verb. (I wonder who Google would start with if they made up their mind to do the same? I know their trademark lawyers don't like the dilution of the trademarked term, but it's a lost cause!)

This smacks of desperation. Clearly their biggest issue is the use of "Tivo-like" which must just kill them - if I were running the company, that's the one that would stick in my craw. But policing society's use of Tivo as a verb? Crazy.

Attempts to muzzle society's use of your trademark in what essentially is idiomatic conversation is doomed to failure. You can't do it. And the process of trying will only make for bad will. I say, celebrate the fact that you're a verb - it's an honor! If you can't, you're in for a long cold winter. I, for one, would love to be bigfooted for saying I Tivo'd something last night. In fact, I *did* Tivo something last night. Yup, I Tivo'd a few things, in fact, including Desperate Housewives. But my attempt at Tivoing doesn't always work - I missed the last few episodes due to a bad connection to my cable box. Which makes me sad. I think I need a kleenex.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:29 AM
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IBM Searching for Profit

I don't cover enterprise search much, in the book I have a place where I basically say: sorry, I have to punt, but this stuff is important - in particular to the future. It's not a solved problem right now (less so even than web search, it seems) but IBM is working on it, according to this Cnet story. Some mention of Web Fountain here, my spin on that here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:59 AM
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Google Sued Over Scholar

The American Chemical Society yesterday filed a complaint against Google, claiming the new Google Scholar infringes on its own product, called SciFinder Scholar.

You kind of have to love a place that has a "molecule of the week" on its website (that's Nafion on the left, in case you're wondering...), and SciFinder is certainly in the same business, to a point...but is "Scholar" protected? Maybe. But I sense something else is going on. Reading the story, the "aha" was not hard to find:

ACS’s Chemical Abstracts Service estimates that about 1,000 colleges and universities have bought the service, which provides access to all of CAS’s databases, including information on journal and patent references, substance information, regulated chemicals, chemical reactions, and chemical supplier information.

Aha! Google Scholar is free. SciFinder is paid. If Google Scholar wins out, SciFinder loses. They can't sue Google for making information free, but they can sue for trademark. Good luck, ACS. I think you're going to need it.

Thanks, Ross.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:38 PM
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More On Google, Yahoo, Media, Technology

My post below has garnered some very thoughtful responses, some of which took the route of email or phone calls. It's clear that I need to clarify and revise my ramblings on this subject, and I'm grateful that my thinking-out-loud is worthy of such consideration. Maybe by the time the book is finished, I will have gotten this right, but in the spirit of iteration, here's another hack at it...and this still feels not quite right, like I need a good joints after midnight talk with a few more folks before the dead obvious stuff hits me between the eyes...

First, some of you challenge my distinction of Yahoo as more media-driven and mercantile, and Google as more "pure" and technology driven. And many point out that in the end, even making a distinction between "media businesses" and "technology businesses" is a distinction without a difference - both are in the business of creating value for customers. Such a distinction is vulnerable to a charge of easy thinking, and I agree. Let me clarify. In the end, I believe both companies are in the same business, and if I were forced to name that business in one word, I'd argue that business is media. Yes, Google started its life as an algorithm in a PhD program, and Yahoo started as an edited guide to the web, but they are clearly converging into the same business: they mediate information and services for consumers, and derive value from those services using the traditional revenue streams of the media business: advertising and subscriptions (if you don't think Google is in the subs business, think again).

My point was that understanding both companies' DNA and culture is important in understanding where they might go with relation to content businesses like music, movies, and television in the future, and on that count, Yahoo has a deeper and longer history of understanding the world of making media - most of its senior executives are from the content business, and its DNA was as an edited guide - a content play. While there is no question that Yahoo has and employs world class technology and Google has media experience, I believe the distinction of "media vs. tech" is important when thinking about how each company might approach Hollywood so as to make paid content easily available to all of us at a value proposition that works for all players - content owner, consumer and distributor.

As to the point that Yahoo is more commercial in nature, some of my Yahoo friends may see that as a dig - but in fact, I meant it as a something of a compliment. I think because of its media DNA, the company is clearly more comfortable with extracting fair value for media services rendered, and because of that, I believe has been free to innovate in its approach to search: as one of Yahoo's executives recently put it to me, "We are entirely focused on completing tasks." In other words, if the task at hand is buying an Usher CD, or checking a flight, or finding a local restaurant, Yahoo has repeatedly innovated in building a suite of search results that help a consumer complete that task and get Yahoo paid in the process. That, to me, makes for good online media. (I know that if a shortcut feature on Yahoo is not getting clicked on, for example, it's dropped - "We don't point people to things they don't want," is how one executive put it. I should also point out that the shortcut features do not always point to only Yahoo sites, they also point outside, depending on the search.)

Now Google does the same in many instances (flight checking, local restaurants), but it's always been my impression that the company has been uncomfortable with the idea of tying commerce to its media products - its DNA resists monetizing the value created in any other way than AdWords (and even resisted that, at first). An example is News - there is no business model there yet; and Froogle - again, no business model other than AdWords. In a way, this reticence gates innovation in the search results space. If the consumer truly wants to shop, or browse high quality news results, and you provide a great service to do so, there's no shame in making a buck while doing it, even if that buck is made in other ways than advertising (ie, cutting deals with music or news publishers, or selling your consumers up to a premium service if you can).

I also did not intend to imply that I believe Google is a pure technology company (and some Googlers did take offense at that) - regardless of the reticence the company has shown from time to time on the matter, it is a major media player. And the cards it holds, combined with the moves it has made recently, certainly point toward it being an even larger force in media in the future. Sure, it derives its value as a media company from its extraordinary technology assets, but my point is this: technology+AdWords is not enough. It's also about making great media products, and to make great media products, it helps to see yourself as in that business in the first place.

A very interesting case will be Google Print. As that program expands, and it's rumored that it will, dramatically, a number of questions arise. How will Google monetize out-of-copyright books? If it indeed does bring tens of thousands of out-of-print books onto the web and into its index, will it allow others to access and index that new treasure trove, or will it act more like a traditional media company, which would "own" that resource for itself? How will it choose what it brings into the index - those that might sell? Those that somehow are the most "in demand" by some measurable standard? With regard to books that are in print, will it limit itself to being soley an organizational tool supported by AdWords, or will it start to take a vig for books that are sold via the Google Print service (in fact, maybe it does already and I'm simply unaware of it - any publishers out there, let me know!)? And will the print model scale to television and movies or music?

As to search, pure, organic search, I have one additional observation. Pure organic search made Google what it is, and remains the True North of the company. At Yahoo, pure organic search is viewed as one (extremely important) option among a range of search-related services that the company provides. When you enter a search term, pure organic results are always there, but so are other services that the company has developed in response to the implied intent of your declarative term. That's why I brought up the conundrum inherent in content-based searches - can you really write an "objective" algorithm for the One Great Index when it comes to paid content like movies and music? (Even in the case of finance content, Google's solution feels temporary - it currently points to Yahoo Finance). Maybe you can, but it seems like a very difficult task without the moderating forces of great media products backed by robust commerce models (ie services that help consumers find what they are looking for in a far more specialized way - think AOL's Pinpoint and Yahoo Local Search).

For me, these are all interesting questions, because they help untangle the intentions and possible future paths of two innovative, valuable, and extremely important companies.

Let me know what you think, as always...and happy weekend!

(Hat tip to all of you who contacted me but prefer to remain anonymous, and to Gary for Pinpoint!)

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:25 PM
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Pell On Google Suggest: Po = Poetry?

Dave Pell checks out Google Suggest and does the one letter test, and the results are fun. He wonders, however:

I find it hard to believe that more people who type in the letters P-O are ultimately looking for poetry than porn.

That's safesearch for ya!

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:48 PM
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And Then Google Announces "Google Suggest...."

Just as I riff on "Also Try" as a key differentiator for Yahoo, Google announces that they are testing a search suggestion tool. It's not incorporated into the main index, yet, but here are details from a note I got from PR:

"In our ongoing effort to create innovative technologies that enable users to

search more of the world's information, Google today released an
experimental search service on Google Labs called Google Suggest. This new
web search service suggests queries as a user types what he or she is
looking for into the search box. By offering more refined searches up front,
Google Suggest can make searching more convenient and efficient, because it
eliminates the need to type the entire text of a query. In addition, the
service can connect users with new query suggestions that are useful,
intriguing, and fun.

Google Suggest is similar to Google's "Did you mean?" feature, which offers
users alternative spellings for a query. But, Google Suggest works as the
user types in a query in real-time. For example, if a user types "bass,"
Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include "bass fishing"
or "bass guitar." Similarly, if a user types in only part of a word such as
"progr," Google Suggest will offer query refinements such as "programming,"
"programming languages," "progesterone," or "progressive."

Suggested queries are displayed in a drop-down menu below the search field
and users can scroll through and select queries using their keyboard arrow
keys. Google Suggest draws from a wide range of information, including the
aggregate popularity of Google.com searches, to predict the queries and URLs
users most likely want to see. An example of this popularity information can
be found in the Google Zeitgeist. Google Suggest does not base its
suggestions on the searches of an individual user or searches conducted from
a particular computer or browser.

Google Suggest is available via Google Labs at
http://labs.google.com/suggest. This is an experiment, and as always, we
welcome user feedback. Questions and or suggestions can be sent to
labs+suggest@google.com.
"

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:40 AM
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Friday Sketching: Tangential Ramblings on the Roles of Google and Yahoo in Search, Media and Beyond

For some time I've been trying to articulate, in a succinct fashion, what separates Yahoo and Google in terms of their approach to search, media, and ultimately culture. It came up today as I was writing, and damned if I got stuck. So in the spirit of other Friday sketches, I'm going to write out loud here on Searchblog, and depend on your forbearance and insights to get through the draught.

So let's consider a search for the one-word term "usher," and further, let's presume the person typing that search in really does want to know about the (currently) popular singer Usher.

Now on Google, usher brings you a pretty predictable set of results. Because Usher, the singer, is quite popular at the moment and therefore much in the news, Google incorporates some of its Google News results into its SERPs, you can see from the link or picture that there are two in this particular example. On the right are tons of AdWords related to Usher - clearly there are plenty of vendors who stand to make a buck or two off the man, and they've found Google a good way to monetize the term. The majority of the page, however, is given over to listing the top ten Google results for "usher."

Now the first three results, starting with "UsherWorld" - are clearly relevant to the keyword entered, again assuming that we are looking for information about the singer. The rest of the first page of results mixes in the Fall of The House of Usher and the Usher syndrome, which clearly shows some kind of diversification algorithm at work behind Google's curtains - if the engine picked purely on popularity and links, the first few hundred, if not thousand, results would most likely be about the singer.

But in terms of exploiting our intention behind the search term "usher", that's as far as Google goes. All in all, very little overt editorial guidance. You're directed to Usher's website, and that's that.

In contrast, let's take a look at how Yahoo handles the same search. usher on Yahoo Search also gives UsherWorld as the first organic result, but the similarities end there. The first thing you see below the search box is Yahoo's "also try:" feature - asking if you, the searcher, might be looking for a more refined version of the usher search - perhaps you're looking for lyrics to a particular song ("usher lyrics" or "usher my boo lyrics"), or for pictures of usher ("usher pictures"), or for more information on the star's relationship to Alicia Keys ("usher alicia keys"). This feature is driven by Yahoo's editorial decision to watch what its users are searching for and connect the patterns it sees. Behind the curtain, Yahoo makes lists of related searches, then surfaces the most relevant ones. According to conversations I've had with members of Yahoo's search team, the "also try" feature is a huge hit with Yahoo users.

Below "also try" are two blue-backgrounded sponsor results, right at the top (there are also plenty of paid links to the right, as there are with Google). This reflects Yahoo's more aggressive approach to commercialization throughout its site. In all my discussions with Yahoo executives, I've noticed a distinct lack of shame when it comes to commerce: integrating commerce directly into the search process is seen more as a benefit than a detriment (this may have gone too far with the practice of paid inclusion, but a sophisticated discussion of that topic can be left to another day). The premise held is that search advertising is in fact relevant and even helpful to a searcher (a premise that, to be fair, is also echoed at Google, but in an almost apologetic fashion*.)

So a distinction between Yahoo and Google can be seen in the listing of those two sponsored results right up at the top of Yahoo's page. This occurs in more searches on Yahoo than it does on Google, but it does happen at Google: look at this search for digital cameras or American Blinds, for example. In court transcripts in the American Blind case, Google's lawyers assert that the practice of putting paid search results at the top, which many claim is confusing to users, has ceased at Google, but it clearly persists, if in more limited fashion.

Continuing on with Yahoo's results, we next see what I believe is the most vital distinction between how Yahoo and Google handle the intent of their users: the search shortcut. The shortcut (what Jeff Weiner, head of search at Yahoo calls "iY" - short for "inside Yahoo") is an attempt by the company to bring all of Yahoo's most pertinent information about Usher into one place at one time, so as to quickly allow the searcher to declare and execute their intent. In four or so lines, the iY result offers the Usher artist page on Launch (Yahoo's music service), photos and videos of the artist (also on Launch), and the ability to buy the artist's CDs (on Yahoo Shopping). Yahoo News results are incorporated as well. The entire shortcut is flagged by a small red "Y!" so the searcher is tipped off that this particular result comes from Yahoo's own content, rather than the web. (Whether anyone really notices that - or cares - is debatable).

Lastly come the organic results. It's interesting to note that with Yahoo there is far less diversity in the first ten results - the House of Usher is nowhere to be found.

With iY, Yahoo makes no pretense of objectivity - it is clearly steering searchers toward its own services, which it believes can satisfy the intent of the search. In effect, Yahoo is saying "You're looking for stuff on Usher? We got stuff on Usher, and it's good stuff. Try ours, we think it'll be worth your time."

Apparent in that statement lies all you need to know about the difference between Google and Yahoo. Yahoo is a natural media company - the company is willing to have overt editorial and commercial agendas, and to let humans intervene in search results so as to create media which supports those agendas. Google, on the other hand, is repelled by the idea of becoming a content- or editorially-driven company. While both companies can ostensibly lay claim to the mission of "organizing the world's information and making it accessible" (though only Google actually claims that line as its mission), they approach the task with vastly different stances. Google sees the problem as one that can be solved mainly through technology - clever algorithms and sheer computational horsepower will prevail. Humans enter the search picture only when algorithms fail - as was the case with the "I Love Jews" snafu mentioned earlier.

But Yahoo has always viewed the problem as one where human beings, with all their biases and brilliance, are integral to the solution. It's humans, backed by technology, who drive the "also try" results at the top of the page (the process has been automated, but it is classic architecture of participation stuff: "here's what other human beings find useful related to your search"). It's humans, backed by technology, who push Yahoo's internal content and commerce sites to the fore in the iY results. DNA has much to do with it: Yahoo started as an entirely subjective collection of links (Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web), and the first few years at Yahoo were dominated by its human edited directory. Humans first, technology second.

Google, on the other hand, started as an extremely clever algorithm which solved an intractable and recursive mathematical problem. Technology first, humans second. Over the past four years, Google has evolved on this front - if you asked anyone there in 2002 whether it was a media or technology company, the answer was always "technology." Ask now, and it depends on who you ask. But the furthest even the most media-savvy person within Google will go is to say "we're a media-driven technology company." At Yahoo, everyone there understand they are in the media business, from Terry Semel down.

As both companies move forward with new features and services, I expect this distinction will surface in any number of interesting and important ways. Both approaches have their merit, both have and will continue to succeed. But I expect some tension over the next few years, in particular with regard to content. With the recent announcement regarding Google Print and rumblings from around the web about further forays into content, Google is clearly in the process of declaring its position relative to the content industry, and from what I can tell it is this: We will become your distribution sugar daddy. We'll be Switzerland - allow us to index your content, and when people find it through us, we'll enable you to sell it. This approach became more apparent with the discussion and disclosure of a recent patent in Larry Page's name that creates a system by which media is discovered and then paid for.

In such a system, one can imagine that Google has cut deals with any number of content owners and somehow incorporated that content into its index. When you search for something, let's say "usher," the actual content that Usher has created will come up in the results, and thanks to the distribution deals Google has cut, you can buy that content right there on the spot. Everyone gets paid!

But putting yourself into the position of media middle man is a perilous gambit - in particular if your corporate DNA eschews the almighty dollar as an arbiter of which content might rise to the top of the heap for a particular search. Playing middle man means that in the context of someone looking for a movie, Google will determine the most relevant result for terms like "slapstick comedy" or "romantic musical" or "jackie chan film." For music, it means Google will determine what comes first for "usher," but it also means it will have to determine what should come first when someone is looking for "hip hop." Who gets to be first in such a system? Who gets the traffic, the business, the profits? How do you determine, of all the possibilities, who wins and who loses?

In the physical world, the answer is clear: whoever pays the most gets the positioning, whether it's on the supermarket shelf or the bin-end of a record store. Should Yahoo also become a super distributor of media content, it's clear to me that that's the route they will take - they'll figure out some way to index and distribute media content that is moderated by traditional market forces.

But Google, more likely than not, will attempt to come up with a clever technological solution that attempts to determine the most "objective"answer for any given term, be it "romantic comedy" or "hip hop." Perhaps the ranking will be based on some mix of PageRank, download statistics, and Lord knows what else, but one thing will be certain: Google will never tell anyone how they came to the results they serve up. Which creates something of a Catch-22 when it comes to monetization. Will Hollywood really be willing to trust Google to distribute and sell their content absent the commercial world's true ranking methodology: cold, hard cash?

I for one can't wait to find out.

--------------------

*But let us not forget that famous line in Page and Brin's famous and oft-cited academic paper describing Google for the first time:

"For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:30 AM
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Update to Yahoo Desktop Search...

Writing this AM, but full coverage at InsideGoogle, Paid Content, Charlene Li, SEW.

Also, a birdie tells me that AOL is going with Copernic for their desktop search, Andy Beal has perhaps been talking to the same feathered friend.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:01 AM
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Yahoo Desktop Search to Launch

The FT has the scoop. Deal based on X1 (Bill Gross's well-received PC search software - man, Overture, Picasa, Snap, now this...)

More in the morning. From the FT, which I think (inadvertently, I am sure) broke an embargo to publish this (I have seen a demo and was planning on posting late tonight or in the morning):

Jeff Weiner, head of search at Yahoo, described the desktop software as "the next natural evolution of search".

But he also cast the software as part of a broader strategy that would let users tap into Yahoo's wider array of internet services. The first test version of the software would be available over the web early in the new year, he added.

Like Google's desktop tool, the Yahoo product will initially make it easier to find email and files stored on the hard drive of a PC. The internet company then plans to extend the software to draw in other personal information stored on servers over the web, said Mr Weiner.

AP Story.

(By the way, I'm told that Ask will launch its desktop search product next week, Dec. 15th, to be exact.)

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:25 PM
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Le Blog

Well a looky here. I've been telling all my newspaper friends to embrace blogging, to make their business a platform, and to join the conversation. But who's the first major newspaper brand to do it? Le Monde!

Thanks Greg.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:30 PM
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I Love....Jesus!

In a search for for "I love Jews" on Google, Gawker found that the spellchecker asks "did you mean 'I love Jesus?" Oops. Google corrected the error that day, again showing that hand rolling is necessary when algorithms turn a culturally deaf ear.

Thanks, Jason.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:02 PM
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Syndicate IQ

Have not had time to grok, but this new feed service plans to " manage, measure, and monetize syndicated content."

From the home page:

As more publishers, marketers, and enterprises utilize blogs and syndicated content (aka RSS) solutions, the importance of accurate measurement becomes paramount to justify continued investments. Any strategy to monetize syndicated content begins with analysis and data on who, how, and when the content is consumed including the distribution channels.

Syndicate IQ experience and technology enables a set of robust, accurate, invaluable services allowing clients to evaluate and implement the best strategy for utilizing syndicated content.

I can't tell who is behind this, but time will tell.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:57 PM
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Google Datacenter

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Inside Google, news of a major Google data center - $300 million was the figure bandied about. That buys a lot of CPUs....

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:55 PM
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Yahoo Local: Who Needs the Yellow Pages?

Some time ago I was briefed on Yahoo Local, and as the team was putting the service, which I think is quite good for a first effort, through its paces it became increasingly clear to me that were I a small business owner, I'd want the ability to edit my listing so I could make my business look more appealing. In fact, if Yahoo Local were sending me leads, I'd very much want to be able to buy my way into a better listing - perhaps post stellar reviews of my establishment, snappy come ons, the like.

I asked Yahoo if and when they planned to launch such a service, and they gave me a rather tight lipped smile. Clearly, the answer was "as soon as possible." There was clearly the issue of conflicting with Overture's revenue stream, but it seems the company has worked through that. I noticed today (and in various press reports yesterday) that Yahoo has launched this feature. For $9.95 a month a business owner can create a "premium" listing. For free, they can update the current one.

It's not quite what I imagined - the premium listing is pretty rigid in its design - but it's certainly a good start. I will be very interested to see how these listings do for Yahoo.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:41 AM
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Social Search

Friendster and Eurekster have teamed up to allow search based on the filter of your social networks. SearchDay has the goods.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:08 AM
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I Got A Dog or Two In This Fight...

Kottke does a survey of ad-blocking in RSS feeds, and the comments are as interesting as his post. With Boing Boing and Searchblog and a business I hope to start if I ever, ever, finish this book, I got a dog or three in this fight. And honestly, I come down here, at least given the information I have at my disposal now: I think unobtrusive, relevant ads in full text RSS feeds are just fine. If more than half my readership reads my stuff in a newsreader, why should Bloglines or MyYahooRSS be the only folks making money off my work? And don't talk to me about client side readers - the vast majority will be reading from server side solutions like the abovementioned, and those solutions plan to make hay on my content. If we don't support authors, we all lose. My two cents.

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:21 PM
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Majestic on GOOG: Brother, Can You Share a Dime?

Thanks to Seth Goldstein (his blog is a good readBTW), I get fresh research from his company Majestic, and it always has interesting stuff. They're having a small internet conference in NYC next week, and I was supposed to go, but I bagged out so I can work on the book. Sorry Seth. But thanks for the great insights, keep em coming.

Today's insights have to do with Google. My headline? On average, Google gets nearly a dime for every search it serves in the US. A recent report from Majestic, based on proprietary Comscore data as well as Majestic's own panels and other sources, notes:

- 98 percent of GOOG revs are from paid search. 65% of revs are domestic.
- Q3 domestic growth driven by 7% quarter to quarter increase in paid introductions (paid clicks), to 964 million, and a 2% quarter to quarter increase in average price per click, to 5%.
- Average CPC: 54 cents, up a cent quarter to quarter.
- Revenue per query grew 8.3% quarter to quarter to nine cents. (That's right, every search we do on Google makes them nearly a dime, on average).
- Overall US searches grew 6% quarter to quarter, Google powered searches grew by .2%.
- In Q2, 51.9% of all searches on the Google Network included at least one paid listing.
- Of those, 32% include at least one paid introduction.

That's nearly 17% of all searches ending up with a click on a paid link.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:33 AM
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New: AdMarketplace

Another contextual ad player enters the space, this one with the experience of having served the keyword-driven graphical banners on eBay for the past 18 months.

AdMarketplace takes the auction based approach of paid search, but for graphical banners. It's been around for a while, so I guess this is a relaunch. If it's any good, expect Google and Yahoo, not to mention MSFT, to take a long hard build/buy look at the company.

I am talking to the CEO soon, I hope. My first question: why not scale this to the tail? Can bloggers play?

The company is owned by a company called Conducive Corporation, based in San Leandro, CA and NY. Their site is a monopage with no info, and I can't find anything on who's backing AdMarketplace, so I'll be asking that as well.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:06 AM
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Next Up For AdSense: Dancing Monkeys

Whoa! Gary notes that AdSense Image, itself a test program, is planning on taking animated gifs for a test group soon. From the site:

Enhanced image ads

Google will soon be expanding its image ad program to include a wider variety of creative formats. We'll be accepting animated GIFs from a small test group of advertisers, and you'll be able to display these ads on your pages! The new ads will still adhere to the 50KB size limit, and will be reviewed according to our editorial guidelines for image ads. You can opt in to image ads from within your publisher account – for full instructions, please refer to the AdSense FAQ.

OK, now, this is interesting. On the one hand, it's Google clearly following its customer's lead - the advertising customer, that is. And it's crossing a line that until now has not been crossed - moving, dancing images. What that has to do with relevance, the watchword of Google's ad policies up until now, I can't really say. Well, yes I can: Nothing. Animations are all about the other portion of advertising; getting your attention.

It won't be long till my vision of Google as clearinghouse for the entire television upfront comes to pass, I'd wager...

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:02 PM
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Free Prize Inside (Sometimes)

Remember iWon? Yeah, a chance of winning cash for every search. It worked - sold to Ask Jeeves (with parent ISH) for a pretty good sum. Now comes word of Blingo, a search engine that launches Thursday. It will give away prizes on random searches. The engine is based on Gigablast results (is this the first deal for them? Gigablast is the one man band out of New Mexico, much lauded for doing so much with so little...).

In any case, Blingo has gotten coverage from SEW's Danny Sullivan today, and I have been going back and forth with the CEO, Frank Anderson, who wants to clear a few things up. From his note to me:

I believe Danny Sullivan... was coming from the perspective that we're not going to be able to beat Google with a prize / sweepstakes model. I wholeheartedly agree, and we don't have such grand plans. We know our place in this market and simply hope to build a nice niche audience by doing things the right way -- a great user experience and great prizes. ...
It is certainly fair to use iWon as a reference point for Blingo because of the Sweepstakes angle, but the similarities end there. To be fair, Blingo has been implemented in a very user-friendly manner (no registration, spam, etc.) and strips away almost all of the nonsense typically associated with Sweepstakes.

Anderson has a point - for most search startups, you can't out Google Google, you can only find another angle. Blingo's is to have decent results, with the chance of winning a cool prize every time you search. For now it's running AdWords as its business model, but if they pick up traffic, expect that to change....

This makes me think, huh...what happens when Google-like search results - I mean Google circa 2003 or so - become commonplace. Will that be good enough for a lot of folks, and will search become a commodity, as it was thought to be in 1998? Or will Google and first tier engines manage to really make search so much better that 2003 search will look as lame as, well, 1998 search does now?

Yikes. I certainly hope so. But for the masses who are not really super-searchers, maybe good enough *is* good enough. Hmmm.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:51 PM
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Firefox Users: Less Ad Clicks

This makes sense - Firefox users, who are arguably more sophisticated web surfers, apparently click less on Web ads than those who use Internet Explorer. Firefox blocks pop ups and can be set to block images as well. But I think the real reason is Firefox users know what they want.

Firefox is clearly the browser of choice for the digerati, and it's doubled its market share in the past few months. But can it continue?

Slashdot mulls.

(via SEW)

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:13 AM
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Joining the Architecture of Participation Party

With the news that Google has locked down googlereviews.com, incorporated reviews (of sorts) into Froogle, re-launched Google Groups in a bid to get competitive with Yahoo, started to update Blogger, has released desktop search (with its obvious developer platform implications), and is quickly scaling Local with mobile and the like, it's a pretty obvious conclusion to draw: Google is joining the architecture of participation party in a big way. Like eBay and Amazon, Google will gain huge traction when it allows its own users to create value on its platform.

Not totally unrelated side note: I just got a new ping (IE, the pose was just updated in some way) on a year-old Adam Bosworth essay germane to all this. A worthy re-read. I wonder if he's pondering this as he drives new stuff to market at Google these days...

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:34 PM
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Bharat On Google News Bias

Or lack thereof. From Wired News:

WIRED: Most news sites employ humans to try to pull together balanced content. Why not hire a few people to guard against bias?
BHARAT: Google News is not in the business of having humans regulate how much representation there is from the Republicans in response to a certain query and how much is from Democrats. Once you start doing that job, there is a huge responsibility, and we'd rather allow the natural distribution of a given query to surface. I think that having people look at the hundreds of thousands of articles that come in every day is just not practical. Bias may have happened once or twice on certain queries. I don't think the problem is widespread....The truth is, Google News doesn't have a point of view. It's a computer, and computers do not understand these topics the way humans do and can't be systematically biased in any direction.

Bharat is the lead developer of Google News. I have to say, this issue has always stuck in my craw. While I grok the concept of a "computer having no bias," I also fall back to the fact that somebody programmed that computer, to look for specific keywords, to do certain kinds of matching, to query certain sources and not others. The bias isn't directly human bias, the point of view isn't directly human point of view, but it's nevertheless bias, is it not? Or am I missing something?

• Posted by John Battelle at 3:12 PM
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CitySearch Pushes Pay-Per-Call Forward

For local businesses dependent on the Yellow Pages economy, there's nothing more important that the telephone, especially when it rings. The idea of uniting phone leads and search is something of a holy grail in local search, and CitySearch today announced another milestone in its quest for the same. Release in extended entry.

SiliconBeat coverage.

New Product Makes It Easier For Local Merchants To Tap Local Search Users Online 

LOS ANGELES, CA - December 6, 2004 -- Citysearch, a leading local search service, announced the national roll out of its PFP-Calls product to enhance its PFP (pay for performance) advertising package.  The new product allows local merchants to track business leads through the number of phone calls they receive. Merchants are charged a fee per call and when an advertising cap is reached the toll free number (which appears throughout the site) is removed and replaced with the local, non-metered number (which only appears on the merchant's information page).  The new service is offered through Citysearch's partnership with CIRXIT, LLC, an innovative new company whose platform for web-telephony integration is leading pay for performance telephony initiatives.

"While Citysearch has been intensely committed to building up our content and improving search results to provide the best local search experience for consumers, we have also been focused on delivering greater value to our merchants.  Launching PFP-Calls is a direct response to meeting our customer's diversified needs," said Briggs Ferguson, CEO of Citysearch. "Being able to connect people with businesses through trusted content is what makes Citysearch a leading interactive local advertising resource."

PFP-Calls is an ideal advertising product for merchants who either don't have a website or require reservations (restaurants, hotels, or spas) or inquiries (wedding, attorney, auto or medical services).  Citysearch provides a toll free number wherever the local merchant's contact information appears: PFP ads, search results, merchant information page, and/or Best of Citysearch listing. 

Citysearch's enhanced package of interactive advertising products better meets the needs of local merchants, who can now sign up for either PFP-Calls or PFP-Clicks. Separately, merchants can purchase traditional CPM units or sponsorships.

About Citysearch

Citysearch is a leading local search service, providing the most up-to-date information to over eight million people a month on businesses, from restaurants and retail, to travel and professional services. Citysearch empowers users to make informed decisions about where to spend their time and money by delivering more than two million editorial and user reviews and ratings of local businesses. Through its unique Local Pay For Performance (PFP) service, Citysearch enables businesses to capture their most relevant customers online while paying only for the leads received. Citysearch is ranked among the top three local search sites based on usability and content depth and relevance, according to The Kelsey Group (Nov 04).   Citysearch is part of IAC Local and Media Services, an operating business of IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI).

About CIRXIT

CIRXIT has deployed a new and powerful Internet service that seamlessly integrates telephony with the web.  Through CIRXIT its partners quickly and easily deploy pay for performance (PFP) programs that manage, track, and report all calls made to a listed business, whether a call is made as the result of a click in the browser, or by dialing a toll-free or local number.  As a technology enabled service provider CIRXIT complements and empowers the businesses of its partners.  CIRXIT's scalability, reliability, call quality, and number quality are unrivaled in the industry.  Designed for quick, simple, and seamless integrations, and priced for broad deployment across a wide variety of applications and services, CIRXIT is the preferred provider of web-telephony solutions to leading companies in the IYP and local search markets.  CIRXIT was founded in Silicon Valley in 2004.

Media Relations:

Kristen Wareham                                   Doug Schneider/Natalie Svider

Citysearch                                             Ruder Finn

(213) 739-3275                                       (310) 479-9929

kristen_wareham@citysearch.com          schneiderd@ruderfinn.com

                                                                                svidern@ruderfinn.com

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:23 AM
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We Test. No We Don't!

From Electricnews.net, an Irish-based business and finance site, an story about Urs Holzle's European recruitment tour.

"Nobody has tried to hook together so many PCs... You have to be able to deal with failures and make the whole system continue to work," Holzle, one of the first 10 employees of Google, told ElectricNews.Net.

To work in such an environment, Google employees must be creative and work well in a team, and must also be the type of employee that does not take their job too seriously, he claimed. "Employment at Google should be 60 to 70 percent fun," he said, "the rest is blood, sweat and tears." Holzle also noted that even the company interview process is reflective of this overall attitude, claiming that prospective workers are not confronted with a test of their technical knowledge, but will be carefully judged on whether they "fit" within the Google team.

Not confronted with tests? What's this?!

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:37 AM
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Longhand Search

The invisible, deep, and dark webs - those portions of human knowledge that escape search's industrious indexers - continue to shrink. From Slashdot comes news of "search engines for handwritten documents."

Link to the original article.

Thanks, Ross.

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:33 PM
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GoogleScoop

Not too long ago, Google Image search took an embarrassing hit for not having Abu Ghraib images. But Google has now played a central role in uncovering even more images of military abuse. Boing Boing has the full story. Net net: an AP reporter stumbled across these images on a photo sharing site. One would think after Abu Ghraib, taking picture of yourself lording over prisoners would be pretty much verboten. Uploading them to a photosharing site? Beyond stupid.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:02 AM
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What Can One Man Learn in Five Years?

I was going to stay away from posting today, and focus on writing. But I passed my daily word count already, so here's a treat. Eckhard Pfeiffer, who ran Compaq but was run out on a rail in 1999, is coming back to Chair a business search engine, Accoona.

Now, let's remember, this is the same fellow who engineered the purchase of Alta Vista, then demanded it come public within six months. His lieutenant then drove Alta Vista into portaldom, and ultimately, into the arms of CMGI, which then imploded.

In my interviews with Louis Monier and others, I was painted quite a picture of Compaq under Pfeiffer. As I recall, Monier called them "gunslingers" who had "no idea what they were doing."

Apparently, Pfeiffer has learned a thing or two. Maybe he's trying to take a page from Eric Schmidt's playbook - run a lumbering IT giant (in Schmidt's case, Novell), then suprise the world by going to a small internet search startup. Only, Eric joined after Google was profitable, and he didn't wait five years....Anyway. Should be interesting.

From what I could find on Accoona (note the logo has the "infinity" symbol, I guess that's larger than googol), the company has some kind of deal with China (hot!) and uses proprietary AI techniques (so far, no so hot!). More :

Accoona is a New Jersey-based internet company devoted to making it easier for people to find information on the Web. Accoona has pioneered an innovative search engine that makes use of artificial intelligence to understand the meaning of words. Accoona’s Artificial Intelligence Search Technology enables you to highlight key words, SuperTargeting your results and delivering you the pages most relevant to that search term. Accoona’s search engine does not overlook Web pages that contain relevant information but happen not to use the precise key words you enter.

On March 1, 2005, Accoona will introduce an artificial-intelligence toolbar that lives unobtrusively on the desktop. The toolbar will allow users to search the Web intelligently as well as to search the documents on their computer. Say you want to locate an old e-mail but can’t remember the sender’s name or the precise topic, even if you provide only a vague description, the Accoona Artificial Intelligence Search Technology will find the e-mail. The Accoona toolbar is your personal librarian.

ACCOONA'S MISSION
Accoona Corp.’s mission is:

To revolutionize how people find information on the Web, through a new search engine powered by artificial intelligence that understands the meanings of words.

To provide the largest proprietary online database of information on companies worldwide.

To facilitate foreign companies doing business in China and Chinese companies expanding into the global marketplace.

Accoona is launching worldwide on December 6, 2004.

Hat tip: SEW.

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:58 PM
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Fortune on GOOG

Questioning the price of the stock. I found the Eric interview more worthy. (Sub required..I'll summarize it for you as soon as I can...)

Update: Gary has an overview here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:41 PM
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It's All About Citation

Greg finds Rageboy who found that Bezos is building citation linking into its book service. Very, very cool.

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:40 PM
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Sony TV: Missing the Point

Sony TV is Bigfooting Jason Kottke for his coverage of Jeapordy and perennial winner Kenn Jennings.

Jason, we're with you on this one. Come on, Sony, wake up to the fact that Jason made Jeapordy bigger than it would have been, because of his coverage. You should be encouraging folks like Jason. I'm going to lob a few emails into folks at Sony I know, and I encourage any readers with contacts there to do the same.

Anil covers the story well.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:46 AM
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Failure Becomes a Manageable Event

That's the best line from a story posted today on ZDNet UK. It's spoken by Urs Hölzle, Google Fellow, who is currently on a tour of Europe recruiting engineers. ZD "snuck into" one of his talks to potential recruits and has an extensive overview of what he said. The piece includes metrics on Google's infrastructure, but to my eye they seem understated (ie it mentions a 4 billion document index, when Google now claims 8 billion, and 30 clusters of up to 2000 computers, when I've got sources saying it's more than twice that). In any case, it's very interesting reading.

Highlights:

It is one of the largest computing projects on the planet, arguably employing more computers than any other single, fully managed system (we're not counting distributed computing projects here), some 200 computer science PhDs, and 600 other computer scientists....

Google replicates servers, sets of servers and entire data centres, added Hölzle, and has not had a complete system failure since February 2000. Back then it had a single data centre, and the main switch failed, shutting the search engine down for an hour. Today the company mirrors everything across multiple independent data centres, and the fault tolerance works across sites, "so if we lose a data centre we can continue elsewhere -- and it happens more often than you would think. Stuff happens and you have to deal with it."

A new data centre can be up and running in under three days. "Our data centre now is like an iMac," said Schulz." You have two cables, power and data. All you need is a truck to bring the servers in and the whole burning in, operating system install and configuration is automated."...

If the index size doubles, then the embarrassingly parallel nature of the problem means that Google could double the number of machines and get the same response time so it can grow linearly with traffic. "In reality (from a business point of view) we would like to grow less than linear to keep costs down," said Hölzle, "but luckily the hardware keeps getting cheaper."

So every year as the Web gets bigger and requires more hardware to index, search and return Web pages, hardware gets cheaper so it "more or less evens out" to use Hölzle's words. ...

Google wrote its own spell checker, and maintains that nobody know as many spelling errors as it does. The amount of computing power available at the company means it can afford to begin teaching the system which words are related - for instance "Imperial", "College" and "London". It's a job that many CPU years, and which would not have been possible without these thousands of machines. "When you have tons of data and tons of computation you can make things work that don’t work on smaller systems," said Hölzle. One goal of the company now is to develop a better conceptual understanding of text, to get from the text string to a concept.....

Even three years ago, he said, the Web had much more of a grass roots feeling to it. "We have thought of having a button saying 'give me less commercial results'," but the company has shied away from implementing this yet.

Thanks for the tip, KK.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:17 AM
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New Google Groups

Will update this post later, been a bit swamped, but Google relaunched Groups today, with an emphasis on letting folks create their own groups. (Recall this was Usenet for a long time). While the company didn't say it was a driver, Groups will drive more registrations and more content into the core of Google's services. The interface is similar to Gmail. Some info from Google is in the extended entry.

Update: Google Blog posted and then retracted a Google Groups announcement, but the cats over at Slashdot caught it. Slashdot appears to be tearing Google a new one for not supporting search by date and deep linking, among other things. I will check into the deep linking thing, if they don't support that, I am sure it's an oversight. Not supporting deep linking into content that you want as part of the Index is insane. Thanks to reader Brian for the tip.

More on GGroups and all that:

Inside Google
Evan Williams (nice note on Blogger here)

Slashdot (original thread)
Andy
SEWBlog (which notes in another post that "most of Google remains in beta")
Google Blogoscoped

Google Groups is a free service people use to communicate effectively through email and the Web on every conceivable subject. Each Google Group has its own home page hosted by Google where members can start new discussions or reply to existing topics. Every Google Group has its own Google-fast search, making it easy to fi nd discussions deep in the group’s archive. Every group also has its own email address so members can stay in touch. Members can also read and search all public content within Google Groups, including more than 1 billion postings from the Usenet bulletin board service, which dates back to 1981.

The new version of Google Groups enables the easy creation of email announcement-only lists, mailing lists and public discussions in just minutes. And Google Groups also makes it easier to read and participate in discussions. All the replies to an initial post are now gathered on one page. It’s possible to bookmark topics you’re interested in and have new replies to ”My starred topics” visible on your personal group page.

New Features in Google Groups
• Create groups: Create or search web- and email-based communities, and designate your group as public (anyone can read the group’s messages on the Web) or restricted (only members can read, respond or start new conversations).
• Dynamic conversations: Postings to all Google Groups mailing lists and Usenet lists appear within seconds and are indexed within minutes.
• Enhanced user interface: Track and mark topics using the “My starred topics” feature, and view postings by message summary, title, or conversation view.
• Email notifi cation: Receive individual messages or abridged email summaries to participate in discussions via your inbox.
• Easy searching: Search easily for information within a group or across many groups.
• Relevant text ads: Google Groups displays only targeted ads that are relevant to your searches or the content on the page.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:42 AM
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Google News Top Story: Bush Arrested

From the WSJ's Online Journal:

Google News is a great site...(but) If you want to know what the top stories are, you're better off going to a news site that has an actual human editor (at this point we'd be remiss if we didn't plug The Wall Street Journal Online), but some of the stuff that makes its way through Google's algorithms can be a source of high hilarity.

Example: A left-wing site called Axis of Logic published a satirical (though unfunny) article yesterday titled "Canadians Authorities Arrest U.S. President Bush on War Charges," and it ended up as Google's top story. Seriously.

Link to the image.

(Thanks, Gordon)

• Posted by John Battelle at 2:02 PM
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Census: 2003 A Good Year for Movies, Music Even

Movies rang up a healthy increase in 2003, from $60 billion to $64 billion, and music revenues stayed even. I imagine that fact will be used by both sides in the piracy debate, but my sense is this: if it weren't for Napster (the old Napster, that is), those revenues would have been far lower, as no one would have sampled the tail, and begun to buy down it.

(Thanks for the tip, Gary)

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:43 AM
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Several Worth Reviewing...

From SEW. First, the Google lawyers are busy, suing a competitor of their recent acquisition Keyhole. Second, Gary does an appreciation of Eugene Garfield, father of citation analysis, whose spirit was most definitely in the room last night as I spoke with Larry and Sergey (for the book.) Larry was quite energized by the portion of our conversation that dealt with annotation and citation analysis. (After all, what is the web but one great big annotation engine, right?!)

Lastly, noting recent reports on the Chinese Google News controversy, Danny furthers an issue dear to my heart, transparency with regard to how results are obtained (my take on the China portion of this issue is here).

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:05 AM
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AOL (Netscape) Tosses Hat Back In Browser Ring

From The Standard (I still love being able to say that, even if the site is only running IDG newsservice stuff):

America Online Inc. (AOL) on Tuesday released a preview version of a new Netscape Web browser that is based on the open-source Firefox Web browser, but also supports Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) browser engine. IE is part of Windows and is used by the great majority of Web users. Many Web sites have been designed specifically to work with the Microsoft browser and may not work correctly in browsers using other engines, including the Gecko engine in Firefox.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:34 AM
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Overture Apparently Settles with Geico

Developing: According to MediaPost. Am trying to get confirmation and details. In any case, Overture always had a stronger case than Google, according to folks I've spoken with, as they protected trademarks more robustly and did not adopt the blanket "any keyword can be sold" policy that Google did back in the Spring.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:59 AM
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Google Making Marketing Push?

Some speculation here and there that Google is revving up to start a major marketing push. This seemed more like wishful thinking to me - Ad Age (print only) was the source, and lord knows the advertising world would luuuuv to slurp up some of Google's lucre via some splashy 30 second spots. But it seemed totally off base to me, so I lobbed a call into some folks I know over at Google, and they confirm, this report is off base. Yes, Google talks to agencies now and again, and yes they use them for relatively minor stuff like placing B2B stuff in support of AdSense and the like, but no, there is no major review for a branding campaign.

I mean, think about it. Google makes its hay with pure ROI advertising. Google, spending on brand advertising, in TV and print? Don't make no sense.

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:04 AM
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