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John Battelle wonders if you are compelled to stare at the Bruce Clay search engine landscape chart via Kottke.
If you do, you will notice that its not quite what it appears. Consolidation means that there are only 8 companies involved (I’ve highlighted them in separate colors above) and the outbound link from Looksmart has now gone, leaving only 2 3rd party providers, Google and Yahoo.
Google AdSense: A better way to make ad revenue
Hmm.
Update, this is even more absurd:
Perhaps the strapline should have read: “Google Adwords, Ads that work unless you are in advertising and are an expert in ads in which case adwords are far too subtle” or “Google Adwords, ads that don’t always work” or “Google Adwords, as not used by Google and not suitable for advertising execs or children under 5″
For the sake of brand marketing instead of ‘marketing marketing solutions to marketing people’ - as they used to say in 1999, Google should eat its own dogfood and advertising people should feed from the same bowl.
“By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.”
OK- this is not unusual, even if aggressively worded, but considering that Orkut has a great deal more personal profiling than most social network tools, isn’t it about time that people started an identity system where people actually owned their own identity.
Think how useful it is for Google to have your personal profile in order to target ads at you, particularly as they go after the $25billion yellow pages advertising market. People are giving valuable information away for free as part of a game.
Search for ‘Linux Windows’ on MSN and Google respectively:
MSN Search: Results 1-15 of about 18 containing “linux windows”
Google Search: linux windows, results 1 - 10 of about 8,990,000
A slight discrepancy in the numbers.
Update: see comments, MSN does in fact return lots of resuls if you view the second page.
Microsoft is working on search integrated into the OS:
“The tools could also permit Microsoft to undermine the utility of commercial search engines such as Google by making its own software the easiest place to initiate an investigation. Spell-checkers, after all, were once independent applications too.”
This is no surprise, building search into the desktop is something that Microsoft will allways have an advantage with. But it does raise an important issue: given that documents on your hard drive contain personal and sometimes confidential data, it would be alarming to see ads based upon the contents of these documents served alongside searches results on your hard drive.
Without an ad based revenue model for desktop search, Microsoft would have to either make web search separate with a Google competitor via MSN or subsidise a hybrid web/desktop search as part of the OS. Google would be up against a free product and this is all too reminiscent of Netscape vs. IE.
The silver lining is that Google’s advertisers pay not searchers and Google ads, clearly marked as such, are a benefit to users which actually enhances the service.
Clay Shirky is continuing to set himself up as the anti-semantic web guy. Its an easy target and good for spin. But, after all, what is anti-semantic if it isn’t meaningless.
Clay on the Yahoo ontology: “it sucked. Sucked sucked sucked. We didn’t even know how bad it sucked until Google came along and (its hard to remember this even five years later) saved the Web from drowning in its own waste.”
Well, three things:
Google is a search engine, and does pretty much what Altavista did 5 years ago, before they stopped being just a search engine. They sensibly ignore meta tags, but that was largely to do with people deliberately entering false information. Yahoo’s category search (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) is becoming a search engine ‘Yase’ because its difficult to impose ontologies on the web as a whole.
Things that aren’t really search engines, like Amazon and Ebay, or the classification of species for that matter, would be useless without some kind of ontology.
Even without a complete hierarchical system for classification, metadata is useful where pure full text search fails. Try searching for a cheap flight on Google, you can’t - unless they scrape the metadata.
Many companies use the Google Trademark Complaint Procedure to stop competitors bidding on a company name or product. As this becomes more common practice it may hurt Google’s revenue potential and therefore, valuation.
I wonder whether this leads to the possibility of people trademarking terms and expressions specifically so that they can use them within Google ads?
This seems to raise a general issue. Given that a trademark is awarded within a specific industry, but a search term is not aware of the context e.g. a search for ‘Windows’ could be for building materials or for software. What is to stop people registering trademarks outside of their common use in order to block keyword searches?
In other words, given that ‘Windows’ is trademarked, why couldn’t you trademark ‘blog’ as a type of candy and block anyone advertising against it regardless of the context.
Microsoft owns the desktop. At one time it owned the command line, the C:\ prompt, and now it must own the command line that connects away from the desktop to the Internet.
This is the core of what Microsoft is about, its unstated mission statement, and this was why Microsoft had to react quickly to the threat posed by Netscape.
Google owns the command line to the Internet and Microsoft cannot afford to concede that to them. That is why they may indeed have explored buying Google. Even if the reports of this are not true, as is probably the case, the rumor itself signals a warning shot that Google are on Microsoft’s turf and so perhaps lowers the price that they could buy them for post IPO.
Google is set to battle two giants, Microsoft and Yahoo. Google have the brand, Microsoft the ability to put search directly into the computers that people buy and Yahoo have the portal extras that are very difficult to introduce without losing focus.
Google, who has done everything right so far will do everything it can to avoid becoming a Netscape to Microsoft and an Altavista to Yahoo. It will need to lock in customers by making it difficult to switch rather than relying on brand alone.
One of the benefits of ‘CPC’ based online advertising, where you pay for clicks rather than impressions, is that if the advertiser works out the average number of clicks that result in a sale she knows how much a click is worth for it to be profitable.
Tracking this kind of ‘conversion’ used to require custom code, or use of a third party service such as GoToast, but now that Google have built it into Adwords, things should be a lot simpler.
In theory, if you have an ecommerce site you should be able to setup Adwords so that you are guaranteed not to lose money.
You may be in breach of Google
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