search engines

Tom Foremski on what would happen if someone created a treasure hunt with a large cash prize awarded to a single click of an unpublicised adwords ad. A subsequent clicking frenzy could drain advertisers’ accounts, prompting them to ask for a refund. This hypothetical idea is part of a more serious problem – pay-per-perfomance advertising is open to fraud – when you click something, money drains out of an account – this doesn’t happen with TV, print or radio ads. See Adbombing. In the same way that companies like Paypal spent a considerable proportion of their resources dealing with fraud, so will Google. If Google succeeds then its anti-fraud measures will be a competitive edge. If it fails there will be a problem. The moral to all this is that Google’s business model landed on their laps via Scott Banister at Idealab, it is a new model and its weaknesses…

Google News has been in ‘Beta’ for nearly two and a half years. Several million beta testers a day for nearly a thousand days, i.e. more than a billion (non unique) beta testers. That’s quite some QA. I wonder if this is a record? Google launches news service – Computerworld

News search has one feature that is still lacking in search engines: sort by date. This is something which will eventually be a core requirement, and the search engines seem to be asleep at the wheel. Most search engines sort by relevance, but for subjects which change rapidly such as technology, freshness is an important component of relevance. Having just searched for some software on Google I realized that the top results were 4 years old and useless. It is not technically difficult to create date ordering, but it is computationally expensive and requires comparisons as documents are crawled. There is, however, one area where searching by date is already there: weblog searching. The model where content sites ping a server when there are updates soves the date problem cheaply and increases overall relevancy. The ping model is as different from the way search engines currently work, as push is…

It sounds like a very magnanimous thing for Google to do – to build a virtual library of Alexandria, but there is a solid business reason as well. One of the simplest ways to game Google is to scan out of copyright books, rare ones ideally, boost Pagerank by buying hard links, and serve Adsense against the results. This is commonly done currently, with specialist Dictionaries. However, Pagerank only really works if you have original content, i.e. stuff that is not already on the web; slapping up a copy of the works of Shakespeare won’t do. If Google scans out of copyright books, and serves them up itself, then attempts to trick Google into handing out Adsense revenue without generating any content will not work. Google adds major libraries to its database

With desktop search Google now has an application that makes it much more likely that you will continue to use their search engine. They have created a switching cost – after spending several hours indexing your drive, you are less likely to switch to a different service. Although there is a lot of hoo hah about desktop search, its still amazing that it took till 2004 for searching your own machine to become a mainstream app, when you have been able to search thousands of other computers around the world, within an instant, since the last millennium. Expect Microsoft to counter aggressively, their business is built around owning the command line or desktop and they will likely build in indexing out of the box, meaning that Google desktop users will end up with two or more indexes. Whatever Microsoft do, Google have shown the way forward, their desktop search makes…

Google’s attempt at an auction could break a piece of the cronyism that has plagued corporate America and has caused huge failures from the demise of Enron to the collapse of the technology bubble. Middle men creaming large fees for little value-add and dolling them out to friends is not a good thing regardless of whether you are a free market evangelist or not. This is why I am so surprised that people like Dan Gillmor are choosing to attack Google’s offering. Google’s offer price is an attempt to derive price from real demand, not what generates profits for middle men. This benefits small investors in the long term. Why aren’t Google’s PR team on the offensive over this! “If Google’s offering works…then this IPO would legitimize an alternative to the traditional IPO that will diminish the power of Wall Street investment banks. Other companies, companies with lower profiles than…

Digital Deliverance: From More Than 7,000 Sources, Just a Dozen Account for Most Google News Stories?

Via Anil MSN launches Newsbot, Microsoft’s answer to Google news. If you look at the URLs as you mouse over them – its all powered by Moreover..

Google has recently introduced banner ads for their adsense program, so perhaps all the talk about how text ads perform better is not true. You could argue that banner ads are a different thing, that they are richer media and thus brand advertising. But the difference is that Google’s image ads do not pay publishers on an impressions basis, but for clicks, just like current contextual text ads. Adwords works. People click on text ads which are relevant to a search because they are actively looking for something. But perhaps when ads are served alongside static content, the conversion rate is lower, and perhaps people are starting to ignore them now that the novelty has worn off. So maybe in your face image ads are back, for good reason. The problem for Google is that image ads are not only ‘in your face’, they are very much in the face…

HotBot’s New Desktop Search Toolbar: “HotBot’s new Desktop Search utility not only searches the web, it indexes files and email on your computer, making them searchable as well.” It’s only a matter of time before Google do this and perhaps what has held them back was fear of being too aggressive against Microsoft. As I’ve said before, it is crazy that we can search millions of other computers, thousands of miles apart, more quickly than our own machine. Microsoft should have done this 8 years ago, we should not have to wait because of the stagnation created by a monopoly.

Another meme spreads round the web, the Sergey pic is on Hot or Not: Is Sergey HOT or NOT?

My enemies’ enemies are my friends, not when my enemy’s enemies are hosted by my enemy. Sign up for the Google Newsletter at Yahoo Groups Another classic via NTK