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So I was wrong last week, but correct originally. Overture have indeed bought FAST.
Despite the drop in their share price, this is a good move by Overture. Google has not yet raised cash from an IPO and so can only offer stock. Overture is mopping up the loose ends in the search landscape by offering cash and is covering itself against longer term weaknesses.
Until last week I used to wince when I used the word weblog to people I wanted to evangelize them to - particularly people like VCs.
The problem was that a non-technical explanation lead down the path of trying to justify an online diary as something of earth shattering significance.
Google’s purchase of Blogger changes everything. In this sense, it doesn’t matter why Google bought Pyra, but they did, and it helps justify the argument that weblogs are important.
In fact not only does it help, but the Google acquisition helps weave together the perfect story. Google is about search on the web done right, weblogs are about publishing on the web done right. Together they create the web’s basic Input/Output. I can now say that with a straight face in a meeting. Much more than online diaries then, but they’re fun too.
Danger, do not visit the link at the bottom of this posting if you are as boring as I am, it will consume unhealthy amounts of time.
The site graphically shows the popularity of various numbers on the web, their rank and significance.
404 is the 101st most popular number of 100,000 and is associated with the Peugeot 404 in addition to the standard http ‘not found’ error message.
Yours sincerely
Cliff Claven
Tommy Franks is someone who will surely become a familiar face, despite his reputation for being camera shy. He is the commander favored by the White House to initially rule a post war Iraq.
“They call General Franks a ’soldier’s soldier’, a ‘muddy boots soldier’ - and this is the core of the man. In the official army biography, he is ‘Tommy’, not Thomas or Tom. ”
“The long-term goal is to eventually create autonomous, programmable molecular computing devices that can operate in vivo, eventually inside the human body, and function as ‘doctors in a cell”
United Press International: DNA computer sets Guinness record
“Levi’s Europe, meanwhile, has just produced a limited-edition teddy bear complete with a peace symbol attached to its ear.”
From the country that brought you the three armed sweater, the transparent skirt.
In actual fact these skirts are not transparent but have an image printed on them to appear so.
Does your bum look big in this?
If you think the UN or NATO may be farcical, what about the Nobel Peace Prize.
This year, both Bush and Chirac have been nominated, but this hardly compares to 1938 when both Ghandi and Hitler recieved nominations.
With the majority of their revenue coming from two partners who have destination sites and therefore can beat Overture down on revenue split (or ‘cost of traffic’ as Overture call it in SEC filings), Overture needs a destination site, but Google is way ahead of Altavista in terms of users.
This consolidation is bad news for FAST, Microsoft could possibly buy them for MSN, but if inclined to buy at all they may look at AskJeeves.
So what does the search space look like now:
Google
Syndicated and destination site search, paid listings (adwords) and relevance ranked search.
Yahoo
Syndicated (Inktomi) and destination site search, paid listings (they are probably thinking of building their own) and relevance ranked search.
MSN
Destination site search
Overture
Syndicated and destination site search (Altavista),
paid listings and relevance ranked search.
Possible acquisition targets:
AskJeeves (Microsoft); FAST (Microsoft); Espotting (Overture or Google)
The two most important things on the web are publishing and searching.
Three and a half years ago when I stepped off the plane at SFO with my carpetbag, I had two meetings lined up, one with Autonomy and one with Evan Williams from Pyra, a search behemoth and a tiny publishing (actually collaboration software) startup. Pyra was more exciting.
Evan and Meg Hourihan had developed a product that was designed for people who needed to update websites often and easily. To do this they had to produce a beautifully elegant piece of software. Blogger along with Manila seemed to point to something profound, what happens when the web becomes two-way.
Weblog publishing tools allow you to create embedded meaning within documents and they embed that meaning where it is relevant - in the nugget of information that is published as opposed to a web page. RSS syndication and the virtuous circle of searching syndicated content, publishing commentary and re-syndicating content, allow for the beginnings of a whole new way of interacting with the web. They are the foundation stones of the mythical semantic web.
So will an acquisition allow Blogger to flourish? There are a myriad of opportunities for a symbiotic relationship between search and publishing, but Google is now a medium sized company that is focused on ad revenue not cool web applications. For all that, at the very least, realtime search of weblogs will complement news search and Google had the sense to do something here. I just hope they don’t produce a weblog product called Booger.
Well done Pyra - and well done Google.
You are currently browsing the David Galbraith’s Blog blog archives for February, 2003.
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