search engines

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…

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. Google Adwords: Conversion Tracking FAQ

You may be in breach of Google

Most people are familiar with searching a database and most people are also familiar with searching a search engine, but because the latter was not always the case before the web, these two products are usually so different at their core that combining the two either makes searches slow or highly structured searches impossible. Metadata is difficult to infer, but if it is inserted at the point of publishing, as weblog style tools potentially allow, then to search the web like a database will require a product like Cerisent’s. There are other similar products from people like Software AG, but Cerisent’s is the only one where the core is written at a low enough level to scale to the requirements of a hybrid database/search engine.

So it seems that as Yahoo has acquired or de facto acquired Inktomi, AltaVista, FAST and Overture in order to compete against Google, Microsoft is building search in-house. Google has the brand and focus, Yahoo has the community and customers for value-add extras and Microsoft have the ability to easily combine web and desktop/intranet full-text search. But where have AOL been in all this? AOL is looking increasingly vulnerable with no visible plan for search and a dial-up service that looks expensive when compared to broadband.

Andrew Goodman deconstructs the latest search engine stats: Google Sites 32% Yahoo! Sites 25% AOL Time Warner 19% MSN-Microsoft Sites 15% Ask Jeeves 3% “Since Google powers both Yahoo Search and AOL Search, if you assign the lion’s share of searches on those portal properties to Google, you arrive at the conclusion that Google might be powering 60-70% of all online searches.” The searches numbers are almost irrelevant, however – Google won’t have a deal with Yahoo forever, and it won’t be getting any ad derived cash, so the paid search (Adwords etc.) numbers are more interesting: Google Network 54% Overture Network 45% As Andrew points out, are Findwhat and Looksmart really just a rounding error blip? Something weird here. Traffick | Minding the Search Engines’ Business

I had figured that “Overture get bought by Yahoo or Microsoft within a year.” Search engine showdown. So after the consolidation amongst the algorithmic search the paid for search space is also coagulating around the principal search destinations. The major hubs of the web will now be Yahoo, Google and MSN, but MSN seem to be playing a waiting game, perhaps they are arming internally, ready for a battle royal.

Microsoft is flexing its muscles with new in-house search technology for MSN. As the new big three search companies Yahoo, Google and Microsoft really engage they will have to compete on the paid for search as well as algorithmic search. Today Findwhat bought Espotting for $163 million. What’s the bet that Findwhat don’t get bought by someone further up the food chain like Overture, and that Overture get bought by Yahoo or Microsoft within a year. Mercury News | 06/18/2003 | FindWhat.com will buy Espotting for $163 million

One of the differences between Overture and Google is that whereas Overture rank keyword based ads on the amount bid, Google rank them according to a function of this plus clickthrough/impressions history. In other words, does Google have a clickrank algorithm that is analogous to pagerank?

How could you have made more than 10 times your money in less than a year, subsequent to the .com crash? – by buying stock in a .com Last July Ask Jeeves teamed up with Google to have Google supply advertising alongside search. The deal replaced Overture and involves a revenue split between Google and Ask Jeeves, with the majority going to Ask Jeeves. Since most of Ask Jeeves’ revenue comes from this, and since most of Google’s revenue comes from similar, this is a vicarious way of tracking Google’s performance while they are still a private company. The results are outstanding, Ask Jeeves is now worth 13 times what it was before the deal with Google. Contra Costa Times | 07/19/2002 | Ask Jeeves, Google team up for profits

Esther Dyson (who is nobody’s fool) asks why Google have bought Applied Semantics. Craig Silverstein replies that it has to do with advertising, so Esther asks if it has anything to do with the ‘Application of Semantics’. Craig has nothing to add – and a murmur sweeps the room as if to say, ah they are up to something with the Semantic Web… crap. 1. Applied Semantics and fancy fuzzy search or categorization has nothing to do with the Semantic Web. If anything the polar opposite type of search technology is required – something that takes advantage of semi-structured documents such as an XML or RDF database. 2. Google is an advertising company. Search is a fairly finite field in computing – and Google’s research team is now bigger than any University’s – they have this area sewn up. What they don’t have sewn up is the technology and services…