search engines

Search Beyond Google outlines newer search engines’ challenges to Google and they all seem to be based upon different approaches from Pagerank. Was Pagerank what really made Google or was it the fact that they had elegant usability and design, weren’t a ‘big bad company’ and were perceived to be cool for the people that matter when building a tech company – the techies, the early adopters who are the biggest users and potential evangelists? Pagerank is arguably obsolete at this point, as weblogs and trackback and Tripadvisor.com demonstrate. Surely the trophy collection of PhDs that work at Google are better used to optimize Adwords or tackle the physics of cooling fans in the server farms than all be tweaking Pagerank? Is search a software problem or is Google an advertising company with great hardware hosting skills, that pretends to be focused on the arcana of search algorithms because it…

John Battelle: “the rumors are flying again about Jeeves being in play. CBS Marketwatch is fueling them, saying AOL might buy the company and drop Google. I don’t think so, but you never know” Certainly if Ask Jeeves don’t get bought they look very lonely out there as a destination site powered by Google ads revenue. They are less vulnerable than Looksmart in that there is little incentive for Google to ditch them as a channel in the same way that MSN ditched Looksmart as a provider (although Google have leverage in terms of split on ad revenue). I agree with John that they won’t get bought by AOL. They have traffic and a search product but their ad network is provided by Google. AOL have more traffic and search, despite the hype, is a commodity. AOL would be better off with an ad network.

At $40 billion a year for traditional print advertising (10 times the size of the existing search engine advertising market), the online Yellow Pages advertising market is the biggest revenue opportunity for search engines now that the pay-per-performance revenue model is cemented. Since most services transactions happen offline, Google/Overture style PPC (Pay Per Click) is the perfect way to charge advertisers. Latest figures show that search for local services is twice usual estimates, at 25% of all commercial searches online. The market for local services has traditionally been owned by the phone companies who used phone numbers as the key for Yellow Pages listings, however, Yellow Pages publishers have been lazy and arrogant and are just realizing that they could be crushed by the likes of Google, since the majority of revenues will soon come from online advertising. Traditional publishers’ online Yellow Pages are usually very poorly executed, for example,…

TiVo and PVR wishlist: 1. All PVR’s are sold as commodity hardware with no signup or subscription fee or tie in to Cable or Satellite. 2. TV listings are provided for free by ad supported online services. 3. Opt-in targeted ads based upon your personal and viewing profile (with ability to remove items from viewing profile) are served alongside listings. 4. You have total control and ownership of your profile to block certain advertisers or limit your profile. 5. Either onscreen or via a webpage you can buy from ads based on what you have watched. For example if you watched a travel show about Hawaii you can choose special vacation deals from your nearest airport (you can store your zipcode in the profile), if you want to buy what they are wearing on Sex in the City (heaven forbid), then you can. Basically I want to walk into a…

Three major players in search, Yahoo, Google and soon Microsoft makes for more players than some of the other big Internet services, occupied by the likes of Ebay, Amazon, Netflix. Here’s a wild prediction for the first massive merger of the rebound: Microsoft will buy Yahoo (if they can get away with being that aggressive).

MarketingWonk, on agency snobbery towards adwords/adsense: “I’m getting negative vibes from the professional ad community, but mostly I think because syndicated text ads isn’t glamourous [sic] and it cuts out a lot of middle men and agencies.”

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.

orkut – terms of service: “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…

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…